An Effective Authentication Scheme in Mobile Ad Hoc Network

The MANET (mobile ad hoc networks) has suffered from many security problems despite of its advantages such as supporting the mobility of nodes, independence of the fixed infrastructure, and quick network establishment. In particular, especially when establishing security, the traditional certification services have many difficult problems in applying to the MANET because of its safety, expandability, and usability. In this paper, a secure and effective distributed certification service method was proposed using the secret sharing scheme and the threshold digital signature scheme in providing certification services in the MANET. In the proposed distributed certification service, certain nodes of relatively high safety among the mobile nodes consisting of the MANET were set as privileged nodes, from which the process of issuing a certification started. The proposed scheme copes with the problem that the whole network security would be damaged by the intrusion to one node in the centralized architecture and the hierarchical architecture scheme. Also, as the number of the nodes containing the partial confidential information of personal keys decreases, the risk of exposure of the private keys also in the fully distributed architecture decreases as well. By the network simulation, the features and availability of the proposed scheme were evaluated and analyzed in relation between the system parameters