A robust self‐organized public key management for mobile ad hoc networks

Abstract

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.

A comparison analysis of trust-adaptive approaches to deliver signed public keys in P2P systems

“…1, node I could verify D public key with C public key, because it has already a trusted SA with C (solid line), while it cannot establish a SA with K, as I has no secure associations with any of K neighbors in the graph. This problem could be overcome using a chain of certificates like in [21], but also this solution could have some impairments such as:…”

A self-organized key management scheme for ad hoc networks based on identity-based cryptography

“…References [10] and [11] proposed a scheme that uses bidirectional trust associations, thus reducing the number of certificates by 50%. Also it is requested that two independent certificate chains must be formed to authenticate the certificate of a certain node.…”

“…Here is a summary for them: • The nodes use two independent sources for the certificates of the other nodes so that the reliability of the obtained information is higher. ( [10], [11])…”

A Key Management Scheme in Opportunistic Networks Based on Distributed Storage

“…When two nodes communicate, they merge each other's certi cate bases, from which a path of certi cates being veri ed in turn should be found to form a certi cate chain to verify the legitimacy of the two nodes. Literature [10] uses the certi cate-chain method, a small number of adjacent nodes are selected to establish trust and issue certi cates at the initial stage of the network, which effectively improves the robustness of the algorithm. Literature [11] proposes to enlarge the covering area of virtual CA by the certi cate chain and utilize trusted nodes as initial nodes of the chain, in order to enhance security.…”