TIDS: threshold and identity-based security scheme for wireless ad hoc networks

As various applications of wireless ad hoc network have been proposed, security has received increasing attentions as one of the critical research challenges. In this paper, we consider the security issues at network layer, wherein routing and packet forwarding are the main operations. We propose a novel efficient security scheme in order to provide various security characteristics, such as authentication, confidentiality, integrity and non-repudiation for wireless ad hoc networks. In our scheme, we deploy the recently developed concepts of identity-based signcryption and threshold secret sharing. We describe our proposed security solution in context of dynamic source routing (DSR) protocol. Without any assumption of pre-fixed trust relationship between nodes, the ad hoc network works in a self-organizing way to provide key generation and key management services using threshold secret sharing algorithm, which effectively solves the problem of single point of failure in the traditional public-key infrastructure (PKI) supported system. The identity-based signcryption mechanism is applied here not only to provide end-to-end authenticity and confidentiality in a single step, but also to save network bandwidth and computational power of wireless nodes. Moreover, one-way hash chain is used to protect hop-by-hop transmission.