A novel lightweight authentication scheme for mobile ad hoc networks

Abstract

The lack of infrastructure and central authority (CA) makes MANET security a very challenging mission. Fast and lightweight security solutions are required because of the mobility feature and resources limitation of such network. Most recent work uses the identity-based encryption as a basic solution for MANET security. However, the continuing usage of the bilinear pairing operations is costly and not suitable for such environment. In this paper, we present DIDRSA, a new decentralized identity-based RSA authentication scheme for MANET. The number of bilinear pairing operations is reduced to (1 + t) operations. The public keys are secured to provide a safe method for using RSA cryptography speeding techniques. We prove that our scheme is secure against RSA attacks involved when using such speeding techniques. The scheme performance has been tested using simulation scenarios under different routing protocols. We also highlight the usage of this scheme for AODV routing protocol security as a future work.