Key agreement in ad hoc networks

We encounter new types of security problems in ad hoc networks because such networks have little or no support infrastructure. In this paper we consid er one such problem: a group of people in a meeting room do not have access to public key infrastructure or third party key management service, and th ey do not share any other prior electronic context. How can they set up a s ecure session among their computers? We examine various alternatives and pr opose new protocols for password-based multi-party key agreement in this sc enario. Our protocols may be applicable in other scenarios, too. We also pr esent a fault-tolerant version of a multi-party Diffie-Hellman key agreemen t protocol which can be of independent interest. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.