A Novel Approach towards Cost Effective Region-Based Group Key Agreement Protocol for Ad Hoc Networks Using Elliptic Curve Cryptography

Krishnan Kumar; J. Nafeesa Begum; V. Sumathy

doi:10.4236/ijcns.2010.34047

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International Journal of Communications,... > Vol.3 No.4, April 2010

A Novel Approach towards Cost Effective Region-Based Group Key Agreement Protocol for Ad Hoc Networks Using Elliptic Curve Cryptography ()

Krishnan Kumar, J. Nafeesa Begum, V. Sumathy

DOI: 10.4236/ijcns.2010.34047 PDF HTML 4,871 Downloads 8,638 Views Citations

Abstract

This paper addresses an interesting security problem in wireless ad hoc networks: the dynamic group key agreement key establishment. For secure group communication in an ad hoc network, a group key shared by all group members is required. This group key should be updated when there are membership changes (when the new member joins or current member leaves) in the group. In this paper, we propose a novel, secure, scalable and efficient region-based group key agreement protocol for ad hoc networks. This is implemented by a two-level structure and a new scheme of group key update. The idea is to divide the group into subgroups, each maintaining its subgroup keys using group elliptic curve diffie-hellman (GECDH) Protocol and links with other subgroups in a tree structure using tree-based group elliptic curve diffie-hellman (TGECDH) protocol. By introducing region-based approach, messages and key updates will be limited within subgroup and outer group; hence computation load is distributed to many hosts. Both theoretical analysis and experimental results show that this Region-based key agreement protocol performs well for the key establishment problem in ad hoc network in terms of memory cost, computation cost and communication cost.

Keywords

Ad Hoc Network, Region-Based Group Key Agreement Protocol, Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman, Tree-Based Group Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman

Share and Cite:

K. Kumar, J. Begum and V. Sumathy, "A Novel Approach towards Cost Effective Region-Based Group Key Agreement Protocol for Ad Hoc Networks Using Elliptic Curve Cryptography," International Journal of Communications, Network and System Sciences, Vol. 3 No. 4, 2010, pp. 369-379. doi: 10.4236/ijcns.2010.34047.

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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