Identity certified authentication for ad-hoc networks

Ad-hoc networks face huge security lacks. In the most general case entities need to build up a well-defined security association without any pre-established secret or common security infrastructure. In previous work we presented a protocol which provides a weak form of authentication that we call zero common-knowledge (ZCK) authentication. The protocol is extremely efficient and only requires symmetric primitives but does not provide identification. In this work we extend this approach in such a way that our new protocol provides identification at the cost of external infrastructure and moderate computing power. Our new protocol can be used to authenticate messages, e.g., to exchange keys for the earlier ZCK authentication protocol. Compared to public-key schemes, our approach is still very efficient.