Revising centralized certificate validation standards for mobile and wireless communications

Significant specification effort has been contributed on the issue of certificate validation in traditional networking. The emergence of mobile and ubiquitous computing brought about new requirements and limitations. Providing Certificate Status Information (CSI) in such restricted environments is necessary for trust and security. In this paper, we review standards' specifications and suggestions for optimization and we propose ADOPT (Ad hoc Distributed OCSP for Trust), a certificate validation protocol which can be successfully applied in MANETs but also in mobile and wireless networks. A practical comparison between ADOPT and other standards demonstrates that ADOPT performs better in terms of overhead and security.