SMOCK: A Scalable Method of Cryptographic Key Management for Mission-Critical Wireless Ad-Hoc Networks
Mission-critical networks show great potential in emergency response and/or recovery, health care, critical infrastructure monitoring, etc. Such mission-critical applications demand that security service be ldquoanywhere,rdquo ldquoanytime,rdquo and ldquoanyhow.rdquo However, it is challenging to design a key management scheme in current mission-critical networks to fulfill the required attributes of secure communications, such as data integrity, authentication, confidentiality, nonrepudiation, and service availability. In this paper, we present a self-contained public key-management scheme, a scalable method of cryptographic key management (SMOCK), which achieves almost zero communication overhead for authentication, and offers high service availability. In our scheme, a small number of cryptographic keys are stored offline at individual nodes before they are deployed in the network. To provide good scalability in terms of the number of nodes and storage space, we utilize a combinatorial design of public-private key pairs, which means nodes combine more than one key pair to encrypt and decrypt messages. We also show that SMOCK provides controllable resilience when malicious nodes compromise a limited number of nodes before key revocation and renewal.
This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.
- The following copyright notice applies to all of the above items that appear in IEEE publications: "Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/publish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from IEEE."
- The following copyright notice applies to all of the above items that appear in ACM publications: "© ACM, effective the year of publication shown in the bibliographic information. This file is the author’s version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in the journal or proceedings indicated in the bibliographic data for each item."
- The following copyright notice applies to all of the above items that appear in IFAC publications: "Document is being reproduced under permission of the Copyright Holder. Use or reproduction of the Document is for informational or personal use only."