A Robust Distributed TGDH-based Scheme for Secure Group Communications in MANET's

M. Striki, K. Manousakis and J.S Baras

ICC2006 - IEEE International Conference on Communications, Istanbul,Turkey, June 11-15,2006

Abstract

Abstract—Securing multicast communications in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANET) is considered among the most challenging research directions in the areas of wireless networking and security. MANET are emerging as the desired environment for an increasing number of commercial and military applications, addressing also a growing number of users. Security on the other hand, is now an indispensable requirement for these applications. However, the limitations of the dynamic, infrastructure-lessnature of MANET impose major difficulties in establishing a secure framework suitable for such services. The design of efficient key management (KM) schemes for MANET is of paramount importance, since the performance of the KM functions imposes an upper limit on the efficiency and scalability of the whole secure group communication system. In this work, we contribute towards this direction by extending TGDH to a novel distributed scheme: DS-TGDH. Our aim is to modify TGDH to: a) be feasible in the most general resource-constrained MANET where no nodes with special capabilities exist, b) produce considerably lower overhead for the network nodes involved, c) handle disruptions with low cost. We consider the underlying routing protocol in our design, and we apply a distributed TGDH version over a robust schedule, optimizing parameters of interest. We focus on the design and analysis of the “stealthy” TGDH and compare it with the original. Through our analysis and results we shed insight on the actual feasibility of these protocols for MANET and provide realistic and fair comparison results that more accurately advocate the pros and cons of each protocol over the environment of study.