Abstract
A Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) is characterized by the lack of any infrastructure, absence of any kind of centralized administration, frequent mobility of nodes, network partitioning, and wireless connections. These properties make traditional wireline security solutions not straightforwardly applicable in MANETs, and of course, constitute the establishment of a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) in such networks a cumbersome task. After surveying related work, we propose a novel public key management scheme using the well-known web-of-trust or trust graph model. Our scheme is based on a binary tree formation of the network's nodes. The binary tree structure is proved very effective for building certificate chains between communicating nodes that are multihops away and the cumbersome problem of certificate chain discovery is avoided. We compare our scheme with related work and show that it presents several advantages, especially when a fair balancing between security and performance is desirable. Simulations of the proposed scheme under different scenarios demonstrate that it is effective in terms of tree formation, join and leave occurrences, and certificate chain establishment.
Highlights
Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) consist of a number of nodes which are typically unconfined and free to move and utilize wireless interfaces to communicate with each other without requiring any wireless infrastructure
The motivation here is that the binary tree structure is able to boost any certificate chaining transaction and accelerate the re-assemble of the “trust graph” after join/leave events
The first one triggers the formation procedure from a single randomly selected node, while the other hastens the creation of the binary tree by starting concurrently from several different nodes
Summary
Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) consist of a number of nodes which are typically unconfined and free to move and utilize wireless interfaces to communicate with each other without requiring any wireless infrastructure. Any public key-based security system must be provided by an efficient way of making the public key of a node available to another and proving in the same time the authenticity of this key. The solution to this problem in wired, general-purpose networks comes from the use of online or off-line servers that issue certificates to the nodes of the network. If two nodes wish to exchange their public keys and form a common secret, they find a certification path in the graph and they can in this way authenticate each other. An emerging third category attempts to combine trust graphs and threshold cryptography [8] in a fully distributed manner
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