Password-Based Encrypted Cluster Key Agreement in Ad Hoc Networks

Group key agreement protocol aims to compute a shared session key among all the nodes in the group which can be used to construct a private channel in the network. Password-based authenticated key agreement protocols, using low-entropy, human-memorizable password chosen from a dictionary of small size, can achieve authentication without requiring public key infrastructure or trusted hardware capable of storing high-entropy secret key and be more suitable for ad hoc networks. The authors propose in this paper a password-based encrypted cluster key agreement protocol which can be used to compute a cluster key for each cluster.