39 / 2017-05-15 02:53:20

A Security Protocol Against Key Exposure for Wireless Networks

key management

A mesh router in a wireless mesh network needs to maintain secure data communication with its neighboring mesh routers. The effective designs on pairwise key generation and rekeying for mesh routers are essential to protect unicast traffic.Two type of keys have been defined in 802.11s mesh network standard, Pairwise Master Key (PMK) and Pairwise Transient Key (PTK). Once a PMK is exposed , all PTKs that are derived from the PMK will be disclosed. This is a kind of key exposure problem in 802.11s. In this paper, we propose a Strong Key Exposure-Resilient key Management protocol (SKERM) for neighboring Mesh Access Points (MAPs) in wireless mesh networks to minimize the damage caused by key exposure. SKERM supports both forward secrecy and backward secrecy. In addition, SKERM employs a physical layer authentication scheme with the Physical Unclonable Functions (PUF) to resist the impersonation attack that may occur when keys are disclosed.