Noninteractive Self-Certification for Long-Lived Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) have many well-known applications in military settings as well as in emergency and rescue operations. However, a lack of infrastructure and centralized control make MANETs inherently insecure, and therefore specialized security services are needed for their deployment. Self-certification is an essential and fundamental security service in MANETs. It is needed to securely cope with dynamic membership and topology, and to bootstrap other important security primitives and services (such as secure routing and group key management) without the assistance of any centralized trusted authority. An ideal protocol must involve minimal interaction among the MANET nodes, since connectivity can be unstable. Also, since MANETs are often composed of weak or resource-limited devices, a self-certification protocol must be efficient in terms of computation and communication. In this paper, we propose a power-aware and fully noninteractive self-certification protocol based on bivariate polynomial secret sharing and a noninteractive threshold signature scheme. In contrast with prior work, our techniques do not require any interaction and do not involve any costly reliable broadcast communication among MANET nodes. We thoroughly analyze our proposal and show that it compares favorably to previous mechanisms.