Applying forward security and threshold cryptography in ad hoc networks

Abstract

Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) provides a framework for different parties to communicate securely. However, in mobile ad hoc networks(MANETs), the mobility and vulnerability of nodes make the application of PKI more difficult. For example, if there is only a single Certificate Authority(CA), this CA may not be accessible to some nodes. To handle this availability problem and to enhance the security of MANETs, many different ideas have been proposed. However, none of the previous work has discussed these ideas in details. In this paper, we discuss how forward security technology, threshold and proactive secret sharing techniques together with the concept of distributed CAs can be applied to MANETs. We also study the feasibility of applying existing forward-secure threshold schemes in MANETs. We find that these schemes may be inefficient in terms of communication overhead. We believe that a communication-efficient forward-secure threshold scheme is an important future research direction.