Efficient Certification Path Discovery for MANET

A Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) is characterized by the lack of any infrastructure, absence of any kind of centralized administration, frequent mobility of nodes, network partitioning, and wireless connections. These properties make traditional wireline security solutions not straightforwardly applicable in MANETs, and of course, constitute the establishment of a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) in such networks a cumbersome task. After surveying related work, we propose a novel public key management scheme using the well known web-of-trust or trust graph model. Our scheme is based on a binary tree formation of the network's nodes. The binary tree structure is proved very effective for building certificate chains between communicating nodes that are multi-hops away and the cumbersome problem of certificate chain discovery is avoided. We compare our scheme with related work and show that, it presents several advantages, especially when a fair balancing between security and performa...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: EJWCN
• Authors: Georgios Kambourakis, Elisavet Konstantinou, Anastasia Douma, Marios Anagnostopoulos, Georgios Fotiadis
• Keywords: Binary Tree, Certificate Chain, EJWCN 2010, Tree Formation