Providing Distributed Certificate Authority Service in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

In this paper, we propose an architecture for providing distributed Certificate Authority (CA) service in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANET), based on threshold cryptography. We have two major contributions: 1) we make use of the cluster structure to provide CA service, and design a scheme for locating CA server nodes in MANET; 2) we provide a proactive secret share update protocol, which periodically updates CA secret shares with low system overhead. Compared with existing approaches, our CA architecture provides faster CA services to user nodes at reduced system overhead.

A Secure Mechanism Design-Based and Game Theoretical Model for MANETs

“…Dong et al [10] and Bechler et al [4] propose the distribution of the CA service by using threshold cryptography and introduce the cluster structure. The cluster concept is adopted to provide the CA service and proactive secret shared update protocol.…”

“…In classical Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) [9], a Registration Authority (RA) is used to collect and analyze users' requests before forwarding them to a CA to certify, issue and renew user's digital certificate. In Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs), a decentralized certificate authority approach [6], [10], [23] is proposed, due to MANET characteristics, as a solution to avoid single point of failure, MANET attacks and consider nodes' mobility. To handle these requirements, a distributed clustering algorithm is proposed in [22] to cluster nodes based on a set of trusted nodes that belong to a confident community.…”

Dealing with Liars: Misbehavior Identification via Rényi-Ulam Games

“…Note that such cryptosystems require the existence of a trusted certificate authority (CA) for initialization (issuance of keys and certificates) as well as revocation of users via a certificate revocation list (CRL). Several methods have been proposed for the distributed implementation of a CA [11,28,33]. Alternatively, methods based on symmetric keys can be used to protect critical messages [15,24,27].…”

Security evaluation model for threshold cryptography applications in MANET

“…The traditional security mechanism usually need a management center as the trust third party(TTP) to provide key man agement, authentication, access control, multicast group key management and other security services, while it's impractical for MANET. The function of the TTP is realized primarily in a distributed mode in MANET, and some elegant schemes [2][3][4][5][6][7][8] using secret sharing algorithm [I] are proposed with different implementations.…”

“…Dong [7] compares the security of partially and full distributed CA schemes according to the number of server nodes without mentioning how to decide the value of threshold in various environments. Ning [8] proposed a model to evaluate the security of the PKI for MANET, but didn't consider these two factors, too.…”