Revocation of User Certificates in a Military Ad Hoc Network

Abstract

This paper presents a scheme for revoking certificates in a medium-small size semi-ad hoc military network, but the solution can be applied in the civilian side e.g. by police and crisis management. It describes the functionalities of a protocol to handle certificates, a set of policy rules in a node for handling certificates and an analysis how the proposed mechanisms can mitigate attacks on the certificate revocation solution. The mechanisms allows communication between the nodes on a lower security level even if the latest certificate revocation list is not available; protects against false revocations of certificates; and implements a mechanism for lowering trust levels of certificates.