Privacy Enhanced Key Agreement for Public Safety Communication in Wireless Mesh Networks

doi:10.4304/jnw.6.9.1351-1358

Journal of Networks, Vol 6, No 9 (2011), 1351-1358, Sep 2011

doi:10.4304/jnw.6.9.1351-1358

Privacy Enhanced Key Agreement for Public Safety Communication in Wireless Mesh Networks

Qian Wei, Jingsha He, Xing Zhang

Abstract

With the requirements of mobility, flexibility, and rapid response, wireless mesh networks are widely used for emergency services to improve the efficiency of public safety communication to prevent or respond to incidents that harm or endanger persons or property. In this paper, we propose a practical scheme of key agreement with asymmetric encryption based on station-to-station protocol and a privacy enhanced scheme of key agreement with directed signature using the elliptic curve ElGamal cryptography for public safety communication in wireless mesh networks. In the result, only both participants can gain the shared secret key, however, any party else can not understand the key agreement process clearly. We analyze the properties of security and efficiency of the privacy enhanced scheme of key agreement in comparison to the station-to-station protocol and the practical scheme of key agreement with asymmetric encryption. The results of experiment show that the privacy enhanced scheme of key agreement can provide resistance to the unknown key-share attacks, privacy protection for sensitive information included in signature and better efficiency in terms of computational cost.

Keywords

key agreement; privacy protection; wireless mesh networks; public safety communication

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