A survey and taxonomy of distributed certificate authorities in mobile ad hoc networks

Abstract Certificate authorities (CAs) are the main components of PKI that enable us for providing basic security services in wired networks and Internet. But, we cannot use centralized CAs, in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). So, many efforts have been made to adapt CA to the special characteristics of MANETs and new concepts such as distributed CAs (DCAs) have been proposed that distribute the functionality of CA between MANET nodes. In this article, we study various proposed DCA schemes for MANET and then classify these schemes according to their internal structures and techniques. Finally, we propose the characteristics of an ideal DCA system that can be used to verify the completeness of any DCA scheme. This classification and taxonomy identify the weakness and constraints of each scheme, and are very important for designing more secure, scalable, and high performance DCA systems for MANETs and other networks.