Secure and reliable certificate chains recovery protocol for mobile ad hoc networks

The deployment of any security policy requires the definition of a trust model that defines who trusts who and how. There is a host of research efforts in the trustworthy area to securing mobile ad hoc networks. Among the most used approaches are based on public-key certificates and gave birth to miscellaneous trust models ranging from centralized models to web-of-trust and distributed certification authorities. Certificates management in mobile ad hoc networks is a veritable challenge because of constrictions imposed by the nature of the network. The freedom of nodes mobility involves some constraints when designing reliable certification systems. In this paper, we address this issue and we propose a secure and reliable certificate chains recovery protocol for mobile ad hoc networks. Our proposal is based on web-of-trust in which the users ensure themselves the role of the certification service by issuing and managing the public-key certificates. The shortest and the safest certificate chains are selected in order to reduce the communication overhead and resist against compromised nodes which can generate false certificates. An analytical model is developed and simulations are performed in order evaluate the performances of our protocol, in which it demonstrates interesting results.