Key Management Using Certificate-Based Cryptosystem in Ad Hoc Networks

This paper proposed a distributed key management approach by using the recently developed concepts of certificate-based cryptosystem 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. The proposed approach combines the best aspects of identity-based key management approaches (implicit certification) and traditional public key infrastructure approaches (no key escrow).