Providing Distributed Certificate Authority Service in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

In this paper, we propose an architecture for providing distributed Certificate Authority (CA) service in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANET), based on threshold cryptography. We have two major contributions: 1) we make use of the cluster structure to provide CA service, and design a scheme for locating CA server nodes in MANET; 2) we provide a proactive secret share update protocol, which periodically updates CA secret shares with low system overhead. Compared with existing approaches, our CA architecture provides faster CA services to user nodes at reduced system overhead.