Secure group communications in emergency ad hoc networks

Abstract

Ad Hoc networks are an ideal way to form interactions between mobile wireless nodes of emergency services from different domains (i.e. organizations or countries). However, due to the frequent topological and membership changes it is difficult to form trust relationships in an Ad Hoc environment. The existing approaches for building security relationships in Ad Hoc networks are either computationally intensive or require extensive initial coordination/pre-configuration of participating nodes. To address these shortcomings this thesis proposes the use of a flexible trust negotiation approach involving confidential and progressive exchange of digital certificates. This certificate exchange is governed by the local policies of the two participating nodes. A local policy on the service providing node maps the attributes from the certificates received into services it can provide to the remote node. A two-tier key formation scheme is also proposed to ensure the confidentiality of the trust negotiation process and to secure the communication paths.