A Novel Anonymous and Certificate Less Public Key Infrastructure for MANETs

This paper proposes a novel Anonymous and Certificateless Public-Key Infrastructure (AC-PKI) for MANETs. Our contributions are mainly threefold. First, we apply Shamir’s secret-sharing technique to distribute the system trust, essentially a system master-key, across a pre-selected set of nodes, called distributed private-key generators (D-PKGs). D-PKGs collaboratively offer a prerequisite private-key-generation (PKG) service during network operation. Second, we propose offering D-PKGs anonymity protection to defend against pinpoint attacks that are quite easy to conduct and may cause devastating consequences in MANETs. Last, we determine the optimal secret-sharing parameters for achieving the maximum security.