Ubiquitous and Secure Certificate Service for Mobile Ad Hoc Network

Mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is suitable for providing a communication platform for resource sharing or instant messaging to people in public places where no communication infrastructure exists. Like many other applications of MANET, the application over the communication platform has non-trivial security requirements due to the unique features of MANET (e.g. the open nature of wireless links and absence of security infrastructure). As the basis of almost all security services, key management is essential for securing the applications. In this paper, we first propose a certificate-based key management scheme, the ubiquitous and secure certificate service (USCS) for MANET based on the fully distributed certificate authority (FDCA) approach. Compared with FDCA, the proposed USCS is more secure, however, the availability of the basic scheme is sacrificed to some extent. Therefore, an optimized USCS scheme is further proposed for our scenario. Through analysis and simulation, we show that the optimized USCS scheme not only can address the security issue, but also have availability as high as the FDCA approach in our scenario.