Multiple-key cryptography-based distributed certificate authority in mobile ad-hoc networks

Most prevalent Distributed Certificate Authority (DCA) schemes in the MANET are based upon threshold cryptography, which is invulnerable to mobile adversaries and tolerable to missing or faulty DCA server nodes, and thus becomes the "de facto" standard for the security framework in the MANET. However, this scheme cannot defeat Sybil attacks, in which a malicious node impersonates many identities. To solve the problem, a multiple-key cryptography-based DCA scheme, namely the MC-DCA scheme, is proposed in the paper. It is invulnerable to Sybil attacks, and achieves lower communication overhead and moderate latency compared with the threshold-based scheme, which is supported by the simulation results. © 2005 IEEE.