Self-Organized Public Key Cryptography in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

A Mobile Ad hoc NETwork (MANET) is a self-organizing, short-lived infrastructure-free, multi-hop wireless network that contains collection of cooperative autonomous freely roaming mobile nodes communicating with each other by wireless radio links with no human intervention. Each mobile node functions as a specialized router to relay information to other mobile nodes. Selforganization mechanisms create many new and exciting application areas for ad hoc communications. Mobility has a large impact on the behavior of ad hoc networks. Security becomes even harder to achieve in self-organized systems mainly due to problematic key exchange, session handling, absence of centralized services and configuration of all network services on the fly. An efficient key management protocol is an ongoing hot research area. This paper presents the investigation of the problems with the existing key management protocols and Java SE 6 with light weight bouncy castle 1.6 API based implementation of a proposed fully selforganized public key management scheme in mobile ad hoc networks. The scheme allows users to create their key pairs, to issue certificates, to perform authentication and to fully control the security settings of the system without any centralized services.