A threshold cryptography based authentication scheme for mobile ad-hoc network

Abstract

Mobile ad hoc network (MANET) requires high security to exchange information for its usage in environments like military deployment, disaster management and rescue operations. But due to the vulnerabilities of wireless domain, and the lack of any infrastructure in most of the deployment cases, establishing a secure MANET system is a non trivial matter. Many secure routing and cryptographic protocols that are related to packet forwarding, key management and authentication among nodes have been suggested in the literature. As MANET nodes are mobile and have constrained resources, the proposed cryptographic techniques in most cases are not suitable for practical purposes due to high communication and computation overhead. Our work aims to establish a distributed certification authority that is based on threshold secret sharing trust establishment keeping in mind the above constraints. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011.