Resisting Impersonation Attacks in Chaining-based Public-key Management on MANETs: the Virtual Public-key Management.
Chaining-based key management schemes seams to be the ones that best fit the MANET paradigms. The main chaining-based scheme is the Self-Organized Public Key Management System (PGP-Like). However it is fully vulnerable to impersonation attacks. In order to reduce such vulnerability, this article introduces a new public-key management system for MANETs, the Virtual Key Management System (VKM). VKM uses a virtual structure to indicate the trust between nodes and the certicate chains formation. VKM is a very flexible key management scheme. It can behave in a very restrict way, being able to tolerate impersonation attacks to a certain level, or it can behave similarly to the PGP-Like, just by changing a simple parameter. Thus, VKM can suite any user needs with its ability to switch between the two models dynamically, without any network reinitialization or reconfiguration.