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

Abstract

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.