A survey of distributed certificate authorities in MANETs

A Certificate Authority (CA) provides the critical authentication and security services for Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) which are used for the Internet and wired networks. In MANETs (wireless and ad hoc) there is an inability to offer a centralized CA to provide these security services. Recent research has looked to facilitate the use of CAs within MANETs through the use of a Distributed Certificate Authority (DCA) for wireless and ad hoc networks. This paper presents a number of different types of DCA protocols and categorizes them into groups based on their factors and specifications. The paper concludes by proposing the best DCA security services in terms of performance and level of security

Certificate Issuing Using Proxy and Threshold Signatures in Self-initialized Ad Hoc Network ⋆

Abstract. In ad hoc network, it is very crucial to issue certificates safely in the self-initialized scheme where the system authority exists only at the beginning of the network operation. In order to solve this problem, early studies have presented some suggestions by removing the system authority itself and using certificate chain, or by making nodes act as system authorities for issuing other nodes ’ certificates. In this paper, using proxy and threshold signatures, we introduce a certificate issuing scheme that can solve many problems in the previously proposed solutions. We demonstrate our scheme’s performance through the simulation results. Also, we discuss the security value of our scheme’s in various aspects.