Secure and reliable certification management scheme for large-scale MANETs based on a distributed anonymous authority

This paper proposes a compromise-tolerant (t,n)-threshold certification management scheme for MANETs. Our solution allows to mitigate the impact of compromised nodes that participate in the certification service. In our design, certification management is achieved anonymously by an Anonymous Certification Authority (ACA). The latter is fully distributed into multiple disjointed coalitions of nodes whose structure is made hidden. This prevents an adversary from taking the control of the ACA by arbitrarily compromising t or more nodes. In other words, our proposal enhances the compromise-tolerance to more than the threshold number t of nodes without breaking down the whole certification system. As a result, our scheme requires a very smaller threshold than traditional schemes, which improves considerably the service availability. The experimental study shows a clear advantage over traditional threshold-based certification schemes by ensuring a significant positive compromise between security and availability of certification service.