Study on framework of distributed key Management for MANETs

Mobile Ad hoc networks(MANETs) have been receiving growing attention recently. There is no denying that MANETs face serious security problems due to their unique characteristics such as mobility, dynamic topology and lack of central infrastructure support. It is well known that key management is important to security of MANETs. In this contribution, A partially distributed pairwise key Management framework for MANETs is proposed, which is combined Shamir (t, n) secret sharing scheme with Elliptic Curve Cryptography(ECC). A project is put up which can dynamically adjust the value of threshold according to scales of networks. And a method to update the private key shares of service nodes is designed, which doesn´t need to change the private key. Analysis indicates that this framework is secure, flexible, reliable, lightweight and applicable for the characteristics of MANETs.