Key Distribution System for MANET with Minimum Prior Trust Relationship

As various applications of wireless ad hoc network have been proposed, security has become one of the big research challenges and is receiving increasing attention. In contrast with conventional networks, mobile ad hoc networks usually do not provide online access to trusted authorities or to centralized servers, and they exhibit frequent partitioning due to link and node failures and to node mobility. For these reasons, traditional security solutions that require online trusted authorities or certificate repositories are not well-suited for securing ad hoc networks. The present approach provides for a distributed key management and authentication approach by deploying the recently developed concepts of identitybased cryptography and threshold secret sharing. Without any assumption of pre-fixed trust relationship between nodes, the ad hoc network works in a self-organizing way to provide the key generation and key management service, which effectively solves the problem of single point of failure in the traditional public key infrastructure (PKI)supported system. The identity-based cryptography mechanism provided not only to provide end-to-end authenticity and confidentiality, but also saves network bandwidth and computational power of wireless nodes. Index Terms Mobile ad hoc networks, security, authentication, Self-organized, Key Distribution, Identity