AC-PKI: Anonymous and certificateless public-key infrastructure for mobile ad hoc networks

This paper studies public-key management, a fundamental problem in providing security support for mobile ad hoc networks. The infrastructureless nature and network dynamics of ad hoc networks make the conventional certificate-based public-key solutions less suitable. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel Anonymous and Certificateless Public-Key Infrastructure (AC-PKI) for ad hoc networks. AC-PKI enables public-key services with certificateless public keys and thus avoids the complicated certificate management inevitable in conventional certificate-based solutions. To satisfy the demand for private keys during network operation, we employ the secret-sharing technique to distribute a system master-key among a pre-selected set of nodes, called D-PKGs, which offer a collaborative private-key-generation service. In addition, we identify pinpoint attacks against D-PKGs and propose anonymizing D-PKGs as the countermeasure. Moreover, we determine the optimal secret-sharing parameters to achieve the maximum security.