Threshold and identity-based key management and authentication for wireless ad hoc networks

As various applications of wireless ad hoc network have been proposed, security has become one of the big research challenges and is receiving increasing attention. In this paper, we propose a distributed key management and authentication approach by deploying the recently developed concepts of identity-based cryptography and threshold secret sharing. Without any assumption of prefixed trust relationship between nodes, the ad hoc network works in a self-organizing way to provide the key generation and key management service, which effectively solves the problem of single point of failure in the traditional public key infrastructure (PKI)-supported system. The identity-based cryptography mechanism is applied here not only to provide end-to-end authenticity and confidentiality, but also to save network bandwidth and computational power of wireless nodes.