An approach to certificate path discovery in mobile Ad Hoc networks

Abstract

Public key certificates prove validity and authenticity of their ownership and possibly other properties. Certificate path discovery is the critical process for public key verification in hierarchical public key infrastructure (PKI) diagrams. This process is conventionally done in centralized public key management system such as central CA or directory. However, in an infrastructure-less environment, such as a mobile ad hoc network, no such central service is present due to network dynamics. That brings the challenges for public key verification. Some researchers have been exploring public key management in ad hoc networks, but none of their studies are based on the hierarchical public key trust model. In this paper, we present a scheme to represent each CA certificate with a coded certificate path label and design an algorithm to speed up the process of certificate path discovery without the presence of central PKI service. Furthermore, we propose an on-demand protocol to collect the certificates in networks on the fly. In the final we present the performance evaluation for the implementation of our proposed ideas in ns-2.