Secure On-line Key Generation for MANETs by Fragment Assembly

Traditional key-management requires either the use of public key cryptography or that an on-line trusted third party arbitrate the selection and distribution of symmetric keys to communicating nodes. Recently much work has been published on random key predistribution methods, in which keys are predistributed between a limited set of node pairs and are used to bootstrap other required node pairs. We propose an alternate scheme, in which key fragments rather than entire cryptographic keys are predistributed to nodes. This modification leads to a different security analysis model and yields substantially better security guarantees than basic random key predistribution for a fixed amount of per node storage.