A Certificateless Key Management Scheme in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Key management plays an important role in the security of today´s information technology, especially in wireless and mobile environments like mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) in which key management has received more and more attention for the difficulty to be implemented in such dynamic network. Traditional key management schemes are mainly based on PKI and identity-based public key cryptography (ID-PKC), which suffers from the computational costs of certificate verification and the key escrow problem. In this paper, we present a novel distributed key management scheme, a combination of certificateless public key cryptography (CL-PKC) and threshold cryptography, which not only eliminates the need for certificate-based public key distribution and the key escrow problem but also prevents single point of failure.