Design of certification authority using secret redistribution and multicast routing in wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) should provide authentication and key management without a trusted third party because of their self-organizing and self-configuring characteristics. Several solutions to this problem have been proposed in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). But they are not optimal for WMNs because WMNs are with stationary mesh routers (MRs) that do not suffer from the limited power problem. In this paper, we design an architecture of mesh certification authority (MeCA) for WMNs. In MeCA, the secret key and functions of certification authority (CA) are distributed over several MRs. For secret sharing and redistribution, we develop the fast verifiable share redistribution (FVSR) scheme, which works for threshold cryptography and minimizes the possibility of secret disclosure when some shareholders are compromised by adversaries. MeCA adopts the multicasting based on Ruiz tree, which is optimal in reducing the operation overhead. It can update, revoke, and verify certificates of WMN nodes in a secure and efficient manner. Simulation results show that MeCA does not disclose its secret key even under severe attacks while incurring low overhead compared to other existing schemes in MANETs. 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.