A Self-organized Authentication Architecture in Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

Network security is considered one of the obstacles that prevent the wide deployment of ad-hoc wireless networks. Among many security problems, authentication is the most fundamental problem that has to be solved before any others. Some previous solutions requiring centralized entities were not scalable and others requiring physical encounter took a long time. We propose a new architecture, called the Secure Overlay Network (SON), for fully distributed authentication. The SON has scalability because it is constructed in a self-organizing manner. The SON also has NPC-reachability which makes the SON robust against Sybil attacks, and guarantees authentication service between any two nodes in the SON. Both NPC-reachability and simulation results confirm the effectiveness of our architecture.