A distributed anonymous authentication scheme for Mobile ad hoc network from bilinear maps

Abstract

With the development of wireless communication technology, the applications of Mobile ad hoc network (MANET) have been constantly expanded. However, MANET faces many security threats because of their own properties. Authentication is the fundamental service to protect the security of MANET, and in many applications users typically want personal information kept confidential, so that it required the anonymity in the process of authentication. In this paper, we present a distributed anonymous authentication scheme for MANET from the bilinear maps, based on the technique of secret share and zero-knowledge proof, solves the authentication and key management problems of MANET which is lack of fixed infrastructure, achieves the anonymity in the process of authentication and key transfer. Meanwhile the scheme shortens the signature length, thus reduces the computational cost of nodes that is important to the MANET which are often composed of weak or resource-limited devices.