Secret Common Randomness from Routing Metadata in Ad-Hoc Networks

Abstract—Establishing secret common randomness between two or multiple devices in a network resides at the root of communication security. In its most frequent form of key establishment, the problem is traditionally decomposed into a randomness generation stage (randomness purity is subject to employing often costly true random number generators) and an informationexchange agreement stage, which relies either on public-key infrastructure or on symmetric encryption (key wrapping). In this paper, we propose a secret-common-randomness establishment algorithm for ad-hoc networks, which works by harvesting randomness directly from the network routing metadata, thus achieving both pure randomness generation and (implicitly) secret-key agreement. Our algorithm relies on the route discovery phase of an ad-hoc network employing the Dynamic Source Routing protocol, is lightweight, and requires relatively little communication overhead. The algorithm is evaluated for various network parameters in an OPNET ad-hoc network simulator. Our results show that, in just ten minutes, thousands of secret random bits can be generated network-wide, between different pairs in a network of fifty users. TO GET FULL SOURCE CODE CONTACT +91 90036 28940 ns2sourcecode16@gmail.com