Towards a fully self-organized identity-based key management system for MANETs

Cryptography is the basis of security solutions for mobile ad hoc networks. Among public key techniques, the identity-based ones are very attractive for mobile environment, mainly due to their simple key management process and reduced memory storage cost. However, no proposed identity-based key management solution found in the literature is complete. Current solutions either do not consider the main requisites of these networks, as the absence of central administration or self-organization, or do not detail with important operations, such as key revocation or key update. Thus, this paper presents iFUSO, a complete and fully self-organized identity-based key management scheme for mobile ad hoc networks. iFUSO does not depend on any central authority or third trusted party, even during the network formation. Also, iFUSO provides mechanisms to revoke the private key of malicious or compromised nodes and ways to update the keys of non-compromised nodes. Simulation results show that iFUSO is effective while it does not impose a high communication overhead to the system.