Key Management and Authentication in Ad Hoc Network based on Mobile Agent

Key management and authentication is important to security of Mobile Ad Hoc network (MANET). Based on the (t, n) threshold cryptography, this paper introduced mobile agents to exchange private key and network topological information with nodes in the network. This method avoids a centralized certification authority to distribute the public keys and the certificates, thus enhances security. Carrying private key and some state variables, mobile agents navigate in the network according to visitsbalance policy, namely, node with the least visits would be first visited by mobile agent. Any t nodes in the network can cooperate to perform an authentication upon a new node wanting to join the network. Experimental results show that the mobile agent performs very well for improving the success ratio of authentication and enhance security while reducing the communication overhead and resource consumption.