Secure Key Exchange and Encryption Mechanism for Ad Hoc Networks

Secured communication in ad hoc wireless networks is primarily important, because the communication signals are openly available as they propagate through air. The lack of any central coordination and shared wireless medium makes them more vulnerable to attacks than wired networks. As nodes in ad hoc network join or leave dynamically, the efficient key management and encryption mechanism is required to assure confidentiality, integrity and authentication of application data. The objective of this paper is to propose a key exchange and encryption mechanism where nodes are organized in spanning tree fashion and exchange of key occurs only with authenticated neighbors in ad hoc networks. The proposed method aims to use the MAC address as an additional parameter to encrypt as the message specific key to forward data among the nodes.