Structuring proactive secret sharing in mobile ad-hoc networks

Abstract

Threshold cryptography is a novel cryptographic technique sharing secret among members. It divides a secret key into multiple shares by a cryptographic operation. This technique is useful to provide a shared secret key to legitimate nodes in a infrastructure-less mobile ad-hoc network (MANET). As an additional component, proactive secret sharing (PSS) allows a set of nodes holding shares to refresh all shares by generating a new set of shares for the same secret key from the old shares without reconstructing the secret key. It is necessary to reasonably escape from threats of exposing the secret key when threshold cryptography is used. In this paper, we design the PSS protocol implementation specification in a MANET environment. In our scheme all share holder nodes synchronize the PSS procedure in a well-managed fashion to keep the protocol consistency. We then introduce our actual implementation and evaluate the behavior and its performance criteria.