Randomized Authentication using IBE for Opportunistic Networks

Abstract

Opportunistic networks (ONs) are widely used in many critical network applications, and security/privacy issues in ONs are critical for its wide adaption. In this paper, we propose a randomized authentication protocol which consists of node registration and authentication phases using identity-based encpryption (IBE) and trust framework. The key ideas of our authentication protocol are to generate public keys from publicly available node IDs, and not only central registration server but also the nodes with a high trust value can authenticate nodes in a network. By doing this, our protocol is of light-weight and the authentication process is randomized in a distributed way. In addition, to accommodate the disadvantage of IBE, we introduce the idea of distributed KGCs (key generation centers) and the trust framework. The protocol level security of the proposed scheme is proven by indistinguishability-based provable security analysis using random oracles, and the qualitative security analyses for various attacks are conducted.