An Authentication Mechanism Based on Clustering Architecture in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

이동 Ad Hoc 네트워크 환경에서 클러스터링 구조에 기반한 인증 메커니즘

In contrast with conventional networks, mobile ad hoc networks usually do not provide online access to trusted authorities or to centralized servers, and they exhibit frequent partitioning due to link and node failures and node mobility. For these reasons, traditional security solutions that require online trusted authorities or certificate repositories, but those are not well-suited for securing ad hoc networks. Moreover, a fundamental issue of securing mobile ad hoc networks is to ensure mobile nodes can authenticate each other. Because of its strength and efficiency, public key and digital signature is an ideal mechanism to construct the authentication service. Although this is already mature in the internet application, providing public key based authentication is still very challenging in mobile ad hoc networks. In this paper I propose a secure public key authentication service based on clustering model and trust model to protect nodes from getting false public keys of the others efficiently when there are malicious nodes in the network.