KERMAN: A Key Establishment Algorithm based on Harvesting Randomness in MANETs
This addresses the challenge of secure key establishment in mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) without costly hardware or complex infrastructure, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing routing protocols.
The paper tackles the problem of establishing secret common randomness for communication security in ad-hoc networks by proposing KERMAN, an algorithm that harvests randomness from network routing metadata, achieving pure randomness generation and secret-key agreement with minimal overhead.
Establishing secret common randomness between two or multiple devices in a network resides at the root of communication security. The problem is traditionally decomposed into a randomness generation stage (randomness purity is subject to employing often costly true random number generators) and a key-agreement information exchange stage, which can rely on public-key infrastructure or on key wrapping. In this paper, we propose KERMAN, an alternative key establishment algorithm for ad-hoc networks which works by harvesting randomness directly from the network routing metadata, thus achieving both pure randomness generation and (implicitly) secret-key agreement. Our algorithm relies on the route discovery phase of an ad-hoc network employing the Dynamic Source Routing protocol, is lightweight, and requires minimal communication overhead.