Efficient public key certificate management for mobile ad hoc networks

Abstract

Mobile ad hoc networks involve communications over a shared wireless channel without any centralized infrastructure. Consequently, in an optimal solution, management and security services depend exclusively on network members. The main contribution of this paper is an efficient public key management scheme that is suitable for fully self-organized mobile ad hoc networks where all nodes play identical roles. Our approach implies that the operations of creating, storing, distributing, and revoking nodes' public keys are carried out locally by the nodes themselves. The goal of the presented methods is the improvement in the process of building local certificate repositories of nodes. In order to do it, an authentication solution based on the web of trust concept is combined with an element of routing based on the multipoint relay concept introduced in the optimized link state routing protocol. Our proposal leads to a good tradeoff among security, overhead, and flexibility. Experimental results show a considerable decrease in resource consumption while carrying out the certificate verification process. © 2011 P. Caballero-Gil and C. Hernndez-Goya.