Threshold Mechanism-based Mobile Ad Hoc Networks Certificate Services

Along with the growing civil and military deployments of mobile ad hoc network, the security technology of the network receives increasing attention. An ad hoc network is a dynamically reconfigurable wireless network with no fixed infrastructure, so the network security research will be confronted with many new issues.Authentication service is a base of implementation of security mobile ad hoc network, mobile users can exchange data communications securely between each other by certificate service. A traditional centralized or hierarchical certification authority solution does not fit in ad hoc network because it's lack of centralized control.The paper does research on certificate service of mobile ad hoc network, describes verifiable certificate service architecture and its components based on a threshold secret sharing mechanism according to the network characteristics, and focuses on efficient security solutions for certificate issuing, renewal, verification, combination, and revocation, and then presents partial certificate verification approach based on zero-knowledge proof.The prototype system of the verifiable certificate service for mobile ad hoc network is designed on the basis of above research. The computation overhead of key algorithms in the prototype system is measured on heterogeneous devices, and then performance of the proposed certificate service is evaluated. These measured results verify availability of verifiable certificate service architecture.