A New Scheme for Key Management in Ad Hoc Networks

Robust key management is one of the most crucial technologies for security of ad hoc networks. In this paper, a new scheme for key management is proposed using identity-based (ID-based) signcryption and threshold cryptography. It enables flexible and efficient key management while respecting the constraints of ad hoc networks. In our new scheme, public key certificates are not needed and every client uses its identity as its public key. It greatly decreases the need of computing and storage abilities of clients’ terminals, as well as communication cost for system key management.