Abstract
Security is one of the major issues in Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs). Their natural characteristics make them vulnerable to numerous severe attacks. In this paper, we present an enhanced hierarchical key management scheme for secure group communications in MANETs. The proposed approach primarily aims at improving security and complexity, especially complexity in the level of ordinary members for joining or leaving processes to achieve the most possible dynamic characteristic of MANETs without neglecting network security. The proposal scheme is designed with the potential of developing an efficient model interested in keying applied on hierarchical structure to increase the security and make no need to apply rekeying of all group members in different sub-levels as made by hierarchical key management scheme (HKMS). Also, it reduces complexity of processing load, memory usage and improves resources. In the proposed model, each communication between two nodes have a unique key to make it more secure with encrypting messages by different keys for more than one time and support node flexibility. Experiments are carried out on the proposed scheme to show the effect of complexity on each node in different grades and results are compared with traditional HKMS.