Proactive secret sharing for long lived MANETs using Elliptic Curve Cryptography

Abstract

Since MANETs are infrastructure-less, they heavily use secret sharing techniques to distribute and decentralize the role of a trusted third party, where the MANET secret s is shared among the legitimate nodes using (t, n) threshold secret sharing scheme. For long lived MANETs, the shared secret is periodically updated without changing the MANET secret based on proactive secret sharing using Elliptic Curve Cryptography(ECC). Hence, the adversary trying to learn the secret, needs to gain at-least t partial shares in the same time period. If the time period and the threshold value t are selected properly, proactive verifiable secret sharing can maintain the overall security of the information in long lived MANETs. The conventional cryptographic algorithms are heavy weight, require lot of computation power thus consuming lot of resources. In our proposal we used Elliptic Curve Cryptography to verify commitments as it requires smaller keys compared to existing proactive secret sharing techniques and makes it useful for MANETs, Which are formed of resource constraint devices.