An enhanced distributed certificate authority scheme for authentication in mobile ad-hoc networks

In Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs), it is easy to launch wormhole, man-in-the-middle and Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, or to impersonate another node. Our previous work established a network consisting confidentiality and authentication of packets in both routing and link layers. As an extension to our previous work, in this paper, we propose to develop an enhanced distributed certificate authority scheme to provide data integrity, thus making the network more secure from both inside and outside attacks. The proposed scheme makes use of Shamir’s secret sharing scheme along with a redundancy technique to support certificate renewal and revocation. The malicious nodes are detected by the trusting mechanism by monitoring the behavior hop by hop. By simulation results, we show that the proposed scheme achieves more packet delivery ratio while attaining less delay and overhead, compared with the previous existing scheme.