Complexity of Increasing the Secure Connectivity in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

We consider the problem of maximizing the secure connectivity in wireless ad hoc networks, and analyze complexity of the postdeployment key establishment process constrained by physical layer properties such as connectivity, energy consumption and interference. Two approaches, based on graph augmentation problems with nonlinear edge costs, are formulated. The first one is based on establishing a secret key using only the links that are already secured by shared keys. This problem is in NP-hard and does not accept polynomial time approximation scheme PTAS since minimum cutsets to be augmented do not admit constant costs. The second one extends the first problem by increasing the power level between a pair of nodes that has a secret key to enable them physically connect. This problem can be formulated as the optimal key establishment problem with interference constraints with bi-objectives: (i) maximizing the concurrent key establishment flow, (ii) minimizing the cost. We prove that both problems are NP-hard and MAX-SNP (i.e., it is NP-hard to approximate them within a factor of 1 + ε for ε > 0) with a reduction to MAX3SAT problem.