Distributed Secret Key Management Based on ECC for Ad-hoc Network

Abstract

Ad-hoc network without centralized infrastructure makes its security problem tricky. In this paper, we proposed a full distributed secret key management scheme to handle it. The main contribution of this paper is that we combined combined-RSA threshold scheme with elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) to construct a full distributed secret key management scheme. There are several advantages in our scheme comparing with traditional distributed secret key management key: First we transfer the secret share generation process from initiator to nodes which belong to this network so that ECC generation process and secret share generation process can be performed in parallel. Second, the establishment of secure communication between nodes is straightforward and efficient. Third the secret share generation process for new node non-interactive, furthermore secret share update process is also non-interactive. At last we also analyzed the strength of security of the scheme to show it can fulfill the security requirements of ad-hoc.