In mobile ad hoc networks, a single certificate authority (CA) node could be a security bottleneck. Multiple replica of CA is fault tolerant, but the network is as vulnerable as single CA or even worse since breaking one of the CAs means breaking all of them. In this paper a distributed CA system is proposed which is based on the secret sharing scheme. It is assumed that the network is partitioned into clusters and responsibility of the CA is distributed among the cluster-heads (CHs). Therefore, a valid certificate is produced by a quorum of CHs. Also, based on the proposed distributed CA, an efficient key establishment protocol for intra-cluster and inter-cluster communications is proposed.
Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs), due to their lack of physical infrastructures or centralized online authorities, pose a number of security challenges. Traditional network authentication solutions rely on centralized trusted third party servers or certificate authorities. However, ad hoc networks are infrastructure-less, and there is no centralized server for key establishment. Hence, traditional solutions do not meet the requirements of MANETs. In this paper, a key establishment protocol for mobile ad hoc networks is proposed which does not require any centralized support. The mechanism is built using the well-known technique of threshold secret sharing scheme and network clustering. This protocol is robust and secure against a collusion of up to a certain number of nodes and is well adapted with node movements. Due to use of clustering, the imposed overhead is very low compared with other similar key establishment protocols.
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