A Hybrid Certificate Management for Mobile ad hoc Networks
Mobile adhoc network (MANET) applications are gaining importance due to increased number of personal devices and ubiquitous computing. Authenticity is the most fundamental issue in these applications, since a breach of authenticity leads to a system wide compromise. The existing public key infrastructure (PKI) handles the applications in a wired network using a centralized certificate server. This server handles the creation, renewal and revocation of certificates. This procedure is however impossible in mobile adhoc networks due to the absence of fixed infrastructure and centralized management. Apart from these, dynamic topology and link failure may also result in re authentication and may warrant for timely communication. Most of the existing protocols are based on pre shared secret or pre obtained public key certificates. This assumption has some practical weaknesses for some emergency applications using MANET. To overcome the shortcomings, a wide covered network is used to design a secure certificate distribution scheme. The protocol steps are also discussed for this scheme and it is found to be efficient against security attacks and suitable for MANET. The computational cost is given and it is found to be reasonable.