Reduced Overhead Based Approach for Secure Communication in Mobile Ad Hoc Network

Mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is an infrastructureless mobile networks where nodes can freely move and join. MANET has attracted much attention in recent years owing to the increased focus on wireless communication. It is a highly flexible network, vulnerable to various types of security attacks by malicious nodes. Ensuring network security is a major concern in the case of MANET. Certificate revocation play an important role in securing the network by isolating attackers from further participating in network activities. Certification Authority (CA) is responsible for revoking the certificates of attacker nodes. CA maintains two lists, warning list and black list to keep accusing and accused nodes respectively inorder to perform revocation process by considering the first arrived accusation packet. In this paper we focus on the problems of certificate revocation based on first accusation. A threshold based approach is proposed for certificate revocation with better performance, but there is some sort of overhead exist. Inorder to make the communication in MANET more secure we propose a reduced overhead based approach that enhances threshold based approach which introduce an additional list, intermediate list in the CA. The scheme is evaluated and results demonstrate that the proposed scheme is effective and efficient to provide secure communication in mobile ad hoc network.