Key management is one of the important issues in ensuring the security of network services. The aim of key management is to ensure availability of the keys at both the receiver's and the sender's ends. Key management involves two aspects: key distribution and key revocation. Key distribution involves the distribution of keys to various nodes with secrecy to provide authenticity and privacy. Key revocation involves securely and efficiently managing the information about the keys which have been compromised. This paper presents the geographic server distributed model for key revocation which concerns about the security and performance of the system. The concept presented in this paper is more reliable, faster and scalable than the existing Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) framework in various countries, as it provides optimization of key authentication in a network. It proposes auto-seeking of a geographically distributed certifying authority's key revocation server, which holds the revocation lists by the client, based on the best service availability. The network is divided itself into the strongest availability zones (SAZ), which automatically allows the new receiver to update the address of the authentication server and replace the old address with the new address of the SAZ, in case it moves to another location in the zone, or in case the server becomes unavailable in the same zone. In this way, it reduces the time to gain information about the revocation list and ensures availability and, thus, improvement of the system as a whole. Hence, the proposed system results in scalable, reliable and faster PKI infrastructure and will be attractive for the users who frequently change their location in the network. Our scheme eases out the revocation mechanism and enables key revocation in the legacy systems. It discusses the architecture as well as the performance of our scheme as compared to the existing scheme. However, our scheme does not call for the entire change in PKI, but is compatible with the existing scheme. Our simulations show that the proposed scheme is better for key revocation.

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Key revocation involves secure and efficient managing of the information about compromised keys. Spreading the information of revoked keys to the receivers of the key is a challenging task in public key infrastructure (PKI). PKI is more suitable for wired Internet infrastructure and lacks any tailor‐made protocols for extension over an ad hoc network. The paper presents a Mobile Ad hoc Key Revocation Server (MAKeRS) scheme which proposes to improve the performance and reliability of the system. Simulation shows that the concept presented in the paper is more reliable, faster, and scalable than the existing usage of PKI over Ad hoc networks. It proposes auto‐creation of zone of network availability (ZoNA) by each MAKeRS, which holds the revocation list and is the best service provider in its zone. A node automatically updates the identity of the key revocation server when it enters a new ZoNA. Each node maintains a list of identities of the key revocation servers sorted in order of their communication overhead. This list is regularly updated based on the broadcast from the servers and also gets modified based on the mobility of nodes and servers. The various scenarios of mobility of nodes and servers are considered and the scheme is designed to suit such scenarios in an optimum way. It reduces the time to gain information about the revocation list and ensures availability and, thus, improvement of the system as a whole. Hence, the proposed system results in scalable, reliable, and faster PKI infrastructure and will be attractive for the mobile Ad hoc network (MANET) users who frequently connect to the Internet for secured transactions. We discuss the architecture as well as the performance of our scheme compared to the popular existing scheme. However, our scheme does not call for the entire change in PKI, but is compatible with the existing scheme. Our simulations show that the proposed scheme is better for key revocation. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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