A certificate revocation scheme for wireless ad hoc networks

Abstract

The increasing prominence of wireless ad hoc networks is stimulating greater interest in developing adequate security mechanisms for securing applications involving these innovative networks paradigms. To-date, the proposed security schemes either provide inadequate security or they are too costly computationally, and therefore impractical for most ad hoc network applications.Adapting wired network security schemes---particularly those involved digital certificates---to wireless ad hoc networks environments, poses many difficulties, primarily for two reasons: the limitation of computational resources, and the absence of centralized entities for performing critical key management tasks such as certificate revocation.In this paper, we propose a certificate revocation scheme for wireless ad hoc networks. Our revocation scheme not only provides a measure of protection against malicious accusation attacks, but it also effectively eliminates the window of opportunity whereby revoked certificates can be used to access network services.