Publications

Final report for the mobile node authentication LDRD project

Michalski, John T.; Lanzone, Andrew J.

In hostile ad hoc wireless communication environments, such as battlefield networks, end-node authentication is critical. In a wired infrastructure, this authentication service is typically facilitated by a centrally-located ''authentication certificate generator'' such as a Certificate Authority (CA) server. This centralized approach is ill-suited to meet the needs of mobile ad hoc networks, such as those required by military systems, because of the unpredictable connectivity and dynamic routing. There is a need for a secure and robust approach to mobile node authentication. Current mechanisms either assign a pre-shared key (shared by all participating parties) or require that each node retain a collection of individual keys that are used to communicate with other individual nodes. Both of these approaches have scalability issues and allow a single compromised node to jeopardize the entire mobile node community. In this report, we propose replacing the centralized CA with a distributed CA whose responsibilities are shared between a set of select network nodes. To that end, we develop a protocol that relies on threshold cryptography to perform the fundamental CA duties in a distributed fashion. The protocol is meticulously defined and is implemented it in a series of detailed models. Using these models, mobile wireless scenarios were created on a communication simulator to test the protocol in an operational environment and to gather statistics on its scalability and performance.