A Survey of Distributed Certificate Authorities in MANETs
It addresses the challenge of securing wireless and ad hoc networks where centralized Certificate Authorities are infeasible, but it is incremental as it reviews existing protocols rather than introducing new methods.
This paper tackles the problem of providing authentication and security services in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) by surveying and categorizing Distributed Certificate Authority (DCA) protocols, concluding with a proposal for the best DCA services based on performance and security levels.
A Certificate Authority (CA) provides the critical authentication and security services for Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) which are used for the Internet and wired networks. In MANETs (wireless and ad hoc) there is an inability to offer a centralized CA to provide these security services. Recent research has looked to facilitate the use of CAs within MANETs through the use of a Distributed Certificate Authority (DCA) for wireless and ad hoc networks. This paper presents a number of different types of DCA protocols and categorizes them into groups based on their factors and specifications. The paper concludes by proposing the best DCA security services in terms of performance and level of security.