Efficient node admission for short-lived mobile ad hoc networks

Admission control is an essential and fundamental security service in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). It is needed to securely cope with dynamic membership and topology and to bootstrap other important security primitives (such as key management) and services (such as secure routing) without the assistance of any centralized trusted authority. An ideal admission protocol must involve minimal interaction among the MANET nodes, since connectivity can be unstable. Also, since MANETs are often composed of weak or resource-limited devices, admission control must be efficient in terms of computation and communication. Most previously proposed admission control protocols are prohibitively expensive and require a lot of interaction among MANET nodes in order to securely reach limited consensus regarding admission and cope with potentially powerful adversaries. While the expense may be justified for long-lived group settings, short-lived MANETs can benefit from much less expensive techniques without sacrificing any security. In this paper, we consider short-lived MANETs and present a secure, efficient and a fully non-interactive admission control protocol for such networks. More specifically, our work is focused on novel applications of non-interactive secret sharing techniques based on bi-variate polynomials, but, unlike other results, the associated costs are very low