Implementation of group member authentication protocol in mobile ad-hoc networks

In a mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) architecture, there is no pre-existing fixed network infrastructure, and a mobile node in this network sends data packets to a destination node directly or through its neighbor nodes. This situation is of potential security concern since the neighbor nodes cannot be always trusted. In this paper, we design a group member authentication protocol used in a MANET. It aims to allow a set of nodes to legitimately participate in group communication and then distribute a secret group key to the approved nodes to establish secure communication with group members. Our protocol provides knowledge-based group member authentication, which recognizes a list of secret group keys held in a mobile node as the node's group membership. It employs Zero Knowledge Proof and threshold cryptography. We then introduce our actual implementation and evaluate the behavior to ensure its successful deployment.