Evaluation of Key Management Protocols and Their Implementations

Sammanfattning: When constructing a network system it is important to consider the attributes which define said system and how to best build around those attributes. In this report we’ve studied Key Management Protocols as well as 802.15.4 WPAN networks and how key managment is conducted in such networks. This was done to better understand how Key Management Protocols themselves work and if, or how, they differ when used in 802.15.4 networks. In this report we studied 4 different Key Management Protocols: IKEv2,HIPv2,PANA and 802.1X as well as their various implementations. Based on the information gathered we analyzed how an implementation would work according to IEEE 802.15.9. Firstly we found was that IKEv2 offers a lot of functionality at the cost of system complexity and required a lot of memory. It also required major modifications to work in 802.15.4 networks. Secondly we found that HIPv2 offers the ability to separate the locator and identifier tags of TCP/IP and is lightweight. It doesn’t use IP or TCP/UDP and as such required minor changes to work in 802.15.4 networks. Finally, PANA and 802.1X both offer client-to-network authentication using EAP and use a moderate to high amount of space. 802.1X required a moderate amount of changes to work in 802.15.4 networks. PANA on the other hand required few changes, though it should not be used as a general purpose Key Management Protocol in 802.15.4 networks.