Reliable and fully distributed trust model for mobile ad hoc networks

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a wireless communication network which does not rely on a pre-existing infrastructure or any centralized management. Securing the exchanges in MANETs is compulsory to guarantee a widespread development of services for this kind of networks. The deployment of any security policy requires the definition of a trust model that defines who trusts who and how. Our work aims to provide a fully distributed trust model for mobile ad hoc networks. In this paper, we propose a fully distributed public key certificate management system based on trust graphs and threshold cryptography. It permits users to issue public key certificates, and to perform authentication via certificates' chains without any centralized management or trusted authorities. Moreover, thanks to the use of threshold cryptography; our system resists against false public keys certification. We perform an overall evaluation of our proposed approach through simulations. The results indicate out performance of our approach while providing effective security.