A distributed certificate key management method in IEEE 802.15.3 WPAN environment

The weakest defect among the security modes which IEEE 802.15.3 WPAN (wireless personal area networks) provides is the assumption that secret membership is pre-distributed in advance to the communicating nodes by a central key distributor. However, this assumption is inappropriate in WPAN ad hoc environment, since the wireless ad hoc network has no the central administrator node, moreover, the network topology is changed randomly. Therefore, the authentication mechanism of WPAN should be able to guarantee scalability of network, that is, WPAN nodes should not depend on central CA (certification authority) and authenticate neighbor nodes with distributive method. So in this paper, we propose the distributed and self-securing certificate key management method without pre-distribution of certification keys by central trust party. The certification key management is carried out only in online collaboratively among the communication nodes. This method increases the availability of the security service as well as scalability