Key management in ad hoc networks using self-certified public key system

As various applications of ad hoc network have been proposed, security issues have become a central concern and are increasingly important. In this paper, we propose a distributed key management approach by using the self-certified public key system and threshold secret sharing schemes. Without any assumption of prefixed trust relationship between nodes, the ad hoc network works in a self-organising way to provide the key generation and key management services using threshold secret sharing schemes, which effectively solves the problem of single point of failure. The using of self-certified public key system has the following advantages: (1) the storage space and the communication overheads can be reduced in that the certificate is unnecessary; (2) the computational costs can be decreased since it requires no public key verification; (3) there is no key escrow problem since the Certificate Authority (CA) does not know the users' private keys. As compared with the previous works, which were implemented with the certificate-based public key system and identity-based (ID-based) public key system, the proposed approach is more secure and efficient. Copyright © 2007 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.