Distributed certificate authority scheme with weighted secret sharing for mobile ad-hoc networks

Node authentication is an essential security service in mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs). To provide a node authentication service, we have to construct a distributed certificate authority in MANETs. In this paper, to solve the number of neighbor node problem in fully distributed certificate authority (FDCA) schemes, we propose a distributed certificate authority scheme with weighted secret sharing. Each node´s share weight is given with considering current node degree information. Node´s share weight has to be adjusted due to the mobility of nodes. We have analyzed our scheme based on security criteria, and have conducted experiments using the ns-2 simulator to evaluate our scheme and compare it with previous schemes. It is shown that the proposed scheme enhances the certificate service stability by adjusting each CA node´s secret share weight.