Proposed Threshold Based Certificate Revocation in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

Certification system plays an important role in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) to achieve network security. Handling the issue of certificate revocation in wired network is somewhat easy to compare the MANETs. In wired network, when the certificate of a malicious node get revoked, the certificate authorities add the information about the revoked node into certificate revocation lists (CRLs) or broadcast the CRL to each and every node present in the network or either store them on accessible repositories. Whereas the certificate revocation is a challenging task in MANETs and also this conventional method of certificate revocation is not useful for MANETs due to the absence of centralized repositories and trusted authorities. In this paper, we propose a threshold-based certificate revocation scheme for MANETs, which will revoke the certificate of malicious nodes as soon as it detects the first misbehavior of nodes. The proposed scheme also solves the improper certificate revocation, which can occur due to false accusations made by malicious node and also the problem of window of opportunity where revoked certificates are get assigned as a valid to new nodes.