Research Article
Bio-inspired Self-organized Public Key Authentication Mechanism for Mobile Ad-hoc Networks
@INPROCEEDINGS{10.1007/978-3-642-32615-8_37, author={Parisa Memarmoshrefi and Roman Seibel and Dieter Hogrefe}, title={Bio-inspired Self-organized Public Key Authentication Mechanism for Mobile Ad-hoc Networks}, proceedings={6th International ICST Conference on Bio-Inspired Models of Network, Information, and Computing Systems}, proceedings_a={BIOADCOM}, year={2012}, month={10}, keywords={public key authentication security threat in trust and reputation systems ant colony optimization MANETs}, doi={10.1007/978-3-642-32615-8_37} }- Parisa Memarmoshrefi
Roman Seibel
Dieter Hogrefe
Year: 2012
Bio-inspired Self-organized Public Key Authentication Mechanism for Mobile Ad-hoc Networks
BIOADCOM
Springer
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-32615-8_37
Abstract
In mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs), where there is no centralized authority to provide security, trust and reputation mechanisms are applied to maintain security by identifying trustworthy and untrustworthy nodes. However, traditional authentication mechanisms are infeasible for MANETs due to the lack of infrastructure and frequent topology changes. In this paper, we propose a self-organized and localized public key authentication mechanism based on ant colony systems. Every node generates its own public-private key pair, issues certificates to neighboring nodes and provides on-demand authentication services by means of gathering certificate chains towards a target node. Pheromone concentration left by ants along the path of the certificate chains represents the trust level of a node towards other nodes. This model is able to authenticate public keys by selecting the most trustworthy path in certificate chains gathered by ants and can identify and prevent certificate chains with individual or colluding malicious nodes.