Demonstrating the security vulnerabilities of the Identity-based Key Management scheme for MANETs

The next generation of mobile communications will merge the well-known infrastructured wireless networks and the infrastructureless mobile ad hoc networks. However, their natural characteristics make them vulnerable to numerous severe attacks, making security a major issue in such networks. Cryptography mechanisms, both symmetric and asymmetric, provide strong techniques against most vulnerabilities. Among the asymmetric ones, the Identity-Based (IDbased) cryptographic mechanisms are proposed to simplify key management and to reduce the memory storage cost. In IDbased schemes, the node or user identity is used as its public key, while the private key is still provided by an external entity. Among all ID-based key management schemes found in the literature, the Identity-based key management (IKM) is the most suitable for the mobile ad hoc networks environment. However, IKM does not consider the presence of malicious nodes in the system. This paper analyses the IKM operations, evaluating its communication performance and its effectiveness in scenarios under false accusation attacks. Results show that IKM is not efficient in terms of communication costs neither resistant to false accusation attacks.