Abstract. Several researchers have proposed the use of threshold cryptographic model to enable secure communication in ad hoc networks without the need of a trusted center. In this model, the system remains secure even in the presence of a certain threshold t of corrupted/malicious nodes. In this paper, we show how to perform necessary public key operations without node-specific certificates in ad hoc networks. These operations include pair-wise key establishment, signing, and encryption. We achieve this by using Feldman's verifiable polynomial secret sharing (VSS) as a key distribution scheme and treating the secret shares as the private keys. Unlike in the standard public key cryptography, where entities have independent private/public key pairs, in the proposed scheme the private keys are related (they are points on a polynomial of degree t) and each public key can be computed from the public VSS information and node identifier. We show that such related keys can still be secur...