HKDS: A Hierarchical Key Distribution Scheme for Wireless Ad Hoc Network

Wireless ad hoc networks are very popular in many areas such as border area protection, rescue operations etc. These networks suffer security problems due to their infrastructure less architecture. Attacks like passive eavesdropping, impersonation, replay etc. can be easily performed in such networks. Also the devices used in such networks are mostly resource constrained devices. Hence highly secured complex cryptographic algorithm cannot implement in such devices. This paper proposes a two level hierarchical key distribution scheme (HKDS) for wireless ad hoc networks. In the first level the secret key is distributed among the cluster heads using knapsack algorithm. In the second level, the secret shares generated by cluster head using Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT) scheme is distributed among the nodes of the cluster. After that a mutual authentication scheme is introduced through which the node and the cluster head will mutually authenticate themselves and generate the secret session key for communication.