Distributed Key Management in Ad Hoc NETwork Based on Mobile Agent

Key management is important to security of mobile ad hoc network (MANET). Based on the (t, n) threshold cryptography, this paper introduced mobile agent to exchange private key and network topological information with nodes in the network. This method cannot only reduce the network overload, but also improve the service velocity and success ratio of authentication. Any t nodes in the network sized n can cooperate to perform an authentication upon a new node wanting to join the network. Carrying private key and some state variables such as survival time, mobile agent navigated in the network according to visits-balance policy, namely, node with the least visits would be first visited by mobile agent. Experimental results show that the mobile agent performs very well for improving the success ratio of authentication.