Verifiable Secret Sharing protocol for Mobile Ad-hoc Networks

Abstract

Security is the main issue for Mobile Ad-hoc Networks MANETs). Due to unreliable wireless media, host mobility providing secure communications is a challenge. One of the important issues when applying cryptography to MANETs is how to allocate the role of the trusted authority between the nodes. Threshold cryptography provides the way to convey a shared key to a node without the aid of key infrastructure and is suitable for a secret key sharing in a MANETs. Generally, in order to have a secure communication between two (or more) parties, a secure association must be established by sharing a secret. In this paper, we propose a verifiable multi-secret sharing protocol based on an identity based signature scheme, which uses identities of the node’s available in the network. This scheme uses advantages of an identity based signature scheme and hash function for the verifiability, which we do not require much computation. It checks either dealer or participant’s honest, means dealer may distribute a fake share to a certain participant or a corrupted participant may provide a fake share to other participants in reconstruction. In previous proposed schemes [6],[13],[19], they have used one-way function, RSA, Discrete logarithm functions to keep share information in public. Their idea was choosing above mentioned functions is mostly for the purpose of verification of shares. In our scheme, we did not use any exponentiation functions, but we have used two variable one-way function for the purpose of share calculation not for the verification. Our scheme resists dealer and participants cheating behavior efficiently.