An efficient certificate authority for ad hoc networks

The attractiveness of the wireless ad hoc networks lies in the fact that these networks are self-organized: the hosts constituting the networks can communicate with each other without reliance on any centralized or specified entities such as base stations or access points. With these networks finding more applications, the need for adequate security mechanism is increasingly becoming important. Key management is an essential cryptographic primitive upon which other security protocols are built. However, most of the existing key management schemes are not feasible in ad hoc networks because public key infrastructures with a centralized certification authority are hard to deploy there. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a mechanism of distributed certification authority based on threshold cryptography that is suited for wireless ad hoc networks. In the proposed scheme, a collection of nodes acts as the certificate authority and provides the certification service. The feasibility of the proposed scheme is verified by simulation. The results show the effectiveness of the scheme.