Securing resource-constrained wireless ad hoc networks

Abstract — Huge interest and demand on information superhighway have pressed various telecommunications research fronts and lead to a new form of future Internet consisting of wired and wireless segments where resource-constrained devices such as palm pilots and sensors may become integral parts of the Internet rather than access-only platforms. One of the key design problems is the security in such heterogeneous networks, particularly over wireless networks with resource-constrained seg-ments. In this paper, we present a novel approach to addressing security issues and demonstrate why and how the ID-based cryptography can be effectively applied to the resource-constrained wireless networks for various network security problems. Index Terms — Wireless ad hoc networks, wireless se-curity, ID-based cryptography, pairing. I