Elliptic Curve Cryptographic based Group Key Establishment Protocol for Mobile Ad-hoc Networks

Abstract

Establishing a strong cryptography among a group of nodes in ad-hoc networks is more challenging than that of a conventional networks due to the encompass properties that live in mobile ad-hoc nature. Inability to generate large keys, no fixed infrastructure, no central control, limited memory, bandwidth and processing power are some of the significant properties that can be emphasized which will let someone to think deliberately when designing a cryptosystem for secure group communication. Therefore key generation, key management and key distribution play important roles when building any secure group key establishment protocols. Prevailing drawbacks of the existing Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) algorithms and inability to use those algorithms such as RSA and DSA as it is to the deployment of the mobile ad-hoc networks are the factors which encourage the research to seek a pathway to generate shared private keys and the group public key which require all the group members participation for each and every secure transaction so that no one alone or subset of the group can’t by pass the other members. The research explores a strategy to strengthen the group policy which demands the presence of all the group members. This innovative input along with proposing key generation and management technique assure a coherent atomic operation among the whole group members. The concept was mould and streamlined by involving Elliptic Curve Cryptography to facilitate the equal intensity of cryptographic check sum per bit with lower key sizes. Reduced key size provides the advantage of lower resource consumption in ad-hoc environments. Propose distributed cryptographic notion will be intentionally helped to reveal a new era of thinking the cryptographic solutions in a distributed manner.