Self-Certified Based Trust Establishment Scheme in Ad-Hoc Networks

In a Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET), we cannot assume the existence of a trusted certificate authority that is used in regular Public-Key Infrastructure (PKI). Hence a web-of-trust approach in which each node can issue certificates to other nodes in a self- organizing manner is considered to be more suitable to the Ad-hoc nature of MANETs. In this paper, we propose a new trust establishment scheme providing an efficient and lightweight public key authentication without the presence of any trusted third party neither in bootstrapping network phase nor during network life time. Our new approach is mainly based on the combination of both ID-Based cryptography and web of trust concepts to obviate the need of certificate chains for the authentication of public keys of mobile nodes. This guarantees low communication and computation costs with minimum local storage capacity requirements on the mobile nodes.