Decentralized Authentication Mechanism for Mobile Ad hoc Networks

Abstract

Covid 19 has dramatically changed people’s lives around the world. It has shut down schools, companies and workplaces, forcing individuals to stay at home and comply to quarantine orders. Thus, individuals have resorted to the Internet as a means for communicating and sharing information in different domains. Unfortunately, some communities are still unserved by commercial service providers. Mobile Adhoc Network (MANET) can be used to fill this gap. One of the core issues in MANET is the authentication of the participating nodes. This mechanism is a fundamental requirement for implementing access control to network resources by confirming a user’s identity. In recent years, security experts worldwide proposed distributed authentication for MANET due to the lack of a central authority to register and authenticate nodes. In this article, decentralized authentication based on the technology of fog computing and the concept of the blockchain is proposed. The evaluation of this mechanism satisfies the diverse security requirements and strongly protects the networks from attacks.