ID-based and threshold security scheme for ad hoc network

Ad hoc networking allows portable devices to establish communication independent of a central infrastructure. The fact that there is no central infrastructure and that the devices can move randomly gives rise to various kind of problems, such as routing and security. Attacks on routing protocols can create various undesirable effects that defeat the objectives of ad-hoc routing, Ad hoc networks is much more vulnerable to malicious exploits than a wired network. Secure communication is an important aspect of any network environment. Therefore to provide secure ad hoc network: authentication, confidentiality, integrity, non repudiation and access control should be provided. Authentication comes in the first place to ensure secure network operation, since other services depend on the authentication of communication entities. In mobile ad hoc, there is possibility of nodes being compromise, therefore, the network should not have any central control but instead have distributed architecture; when avoiding central control it´s more difficult to implement authentication protocol. In this paper, the recently developed identity based scheme with threshold secret sharing will be used in two different scenarios; in the first scenario the serving nodes have been assumed fixed nodes, in the second scenario the serving nodes have been assumed mobile nodes. The purpose of applying this scheme is to provide authentication, confidentiality, reduce computation cost, avoiding central control and find out the proper threshold value. The authentication protocol has been implemented, tested and compared with central serving control using computer simulator method. The simulator that has been used to simulate the ad hoc authentication protocol is a self developed simulator.