Self-managed heterogeneous certification in mobile ad hoc networks

As mobile ad hoc networks grow into a pervasive computing infrastructure, it is commonplace for wireless nodes owned by different entities to collaborate and communicate with one another. However, in cases where identity authentication is required to secure the communications, a new problem will be raised. On one hand, certificates of different nodes are possibly issued by different Certificate Authorities (CAs), thus, nodes may not be able to authenticate the identity of each other if they do not trust the CAs associated with their communicating parties; on the other hand, as networks scale up and the variety of CAs increases, it will become increasingly difficult to decide the trustworthiness of different CAs through human intervention. In this paper, we propose a self-managed heterogeneous certification scheme, in which multiple distributed nodes cooperatively carry out the functionality of each CA. Nodes may trust a different CA, if there exist sufficiently many nodes which are trustworthy to them and which also constitute that CA. The scheme eliminates the necessity of maintaining any dedicated CA nodes in mobile ad hoc networks, and trust of nodes in heterogeneous CAs can be managed securely and automatically by mobile nodes themselves. Our simulation results have shown that the proposed mechanism can evidently enhance the success ratio of identity authentication between communicating nodes.