Security of Ad Hoc Networks and Threshold Cryptography

Abstract

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a system of wireless mobile nodes that dynamically self-organize in arbitrary and temporary network topologies allowing people and devices to inter-network without any preexisting communication infrastructure. Taking into account its nature and challenges and security issues, we briefly discuss current security solutions, particularly threshold cryptography (TC). Already TC is being sought in computer networks to provide security in terms of availability, confidentiality, and secure key or data distribution. So we investigate to find out what makes it difficult to implement TC in ad hoc networks. To find answers to these questions, we discuss our RSA-based threshold cryptography (RSA-TC) implementation. Through our implementation, we have put forth various drawbacks of key sharing in RSA-TC and have suggested an alternative method of splitting message. Our work further proves why RSA-TC is unsuitable in MANET. Finally, we explore elliptic curve cryptology (ECC) and suggest reasons why ECC based threshold cryptography (ECC-TC) could be a very effective alternative to RSA-TC schemes in MANET.