Inter-Cluster Routing Authentication for Ad Hoc Networks by a Hierarchical Key Scheme

Dissimilar to traditional networks, the features of mobile wireless devices that can actively form a network without any infrastructure mean that mobile ad hoc networks frequently display partition due to node mobility or link failures. These indicate that an ad hoc network is difficult to provide on-line access to a trusted authority server. Therefore, applying traditional Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) security framework to mobile ad hoc networks will cause insecurities. This study proposes a scalable and elastic key management scheme integrated into Cluster Based Secure Routing Protocol (CBSRP) to enhance security and non-repudiation of routing authentication, and introduces an ID-Based internal routing authentication scheme to enhance the routing performance in an internal cluster. Additionally, a method of performing routing authentication between internal and external clusters, as well as inter-cluster routing authentication, is developed. The proposed cluster-based key management scheme distributes trust to an aggregation of cluster heads using a threshold scheme faculty, provides Certificate Authority (CA) with a fault tolerance mechanism to prevent a single point of compromise or failure, and saves CA large repositories from maintaining member certificates, making ad hoc networks robust to malicious behaviors and suitable for numerous mobile devices.