Distributing a Private Key Generator in Ad hoc Networks

A Mobile Ad hoc Network (manet) is a wireless network that does not rely on a fixed infrastructure. These characteristics make algorithms that route network traffic particularly vulnerable to attack. Mechanisms used to protect against such attacks often depend on cryptographic keys. Since the nodes in amanet have limited resources, designing meth-ods for cryptographic key management is particularly challenging. Be-cause the network infrastructure is unstable, assuming that authorities used in key management are implemented using any single node is not realistic. Threshold cryptography can be used to distribute an author-ity, such that it is implemented by multiple nodes. This makes the authority more robust against network failures and harder to compro-mise. However, the bandwidth limitations in a manet result in that pub