This version is available at https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/14906/ Strathprints is designed to allow users to access the research output of the University of Strathclyde. Unless otherwise explicitly stated on the manuscript, Copyright © and Moral Rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. Please check the manuscript for details of any other licences that may have been applied. You may not engage in further distribution of the material for any profitmaking activities or any commercial gain. You may freely distribute both the url (https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/) and the content of this paper for research or private study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge.Any correspondence concerning this service should be sent to the Abstract A mobile ad hoc network MANET is a self-organized wireless network where mobile nodes can communicate with each other without the use of any existing network infrastructure or centralized administration. Trust establishment and management are essential for any security framework of MANETs. However, traditional solutions to key management through accessing trusted authorities or centralized servers are infeasible for MANETs due to the absence of infrastructure, frequent mobility, and wireless link instability. In this paper we propose a robust self-organized, public key management for MANETs. The proposed scheme relies on establishing a small number of trust relations between neighboring nodes during the network initialization phase. Experiences gained as a result of successful communications and node mobility through the network enhance the formation of a web of trust between mobile nodes. The proposed scheme allows each user to create its public key and the corresponding private key, to issue certificates to neighboring nodes, and to perform public key authentication through at least two independent certificate chains without relying on any centralized authority. A measure of the communications cost of the key distribution process has been proposed. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme is robust and efficient in the mobility environment of MANET and against malicious node attacks.

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The characteristics of mobile ad hoc networks cause a number of challenges to security design such as lack of infrastructure, shared wireless medium, stringent resource constraints and highly dynamic topology. Key management is a central aspect for security in mobile ad hoc networks. While central servers generate and distribute the keys in traditional wired networks, distributive key management systems are used in mobile ad hoc networks. Trust establishment and management are essential for any security framework of MANETs. Threshold cryptography has proved to be an effective scheme for key management and distribution. In this paper we propose a trust based threshold cryptography key management scheme for MANETs. In the proposed scheme, threshold cryptography supports security association establishment between mobile nodes in a web of trust. It enables the source and the destination nodes to successfully complete a certificate chain discovery even if the number of trusted nodes in the neighborhood of the requesting nodes is very low. The advantages of the proposed scheme are justified through extensive simulations.

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