Key Management Using Certificateless Public Key Cryptography in 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 approach by using the recently developed concepts of certificateless public key cryptography and threshold secret sharing schemes. 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 services using threshold secret sharing schemes, which effectively solves the problem of single point of failure. Certificateless public key cryptography is applied here not only to eliminate the need for certificates, but also to retain the desirable properties of identity-based key management approaches without the inherent key escrow problem.