A Reliant Certificate Revocation of Malicious Nodes in MANETs

Mobile ad hoc networks are in widespread use in the recent years due to their infrastructureless dynamic topology, ease of deployment and the ability of the nodes to be mobile, making them more defenceless to attacks. Provisioning secure communications between nodes in such a hostile environment is a major concern. Hence, nodes are issued certificates as a means of conveying trust that only nodes with valid certification can function in the network. In our work, we aim to revoke the certificates of malicious nodes from the network warranting a risk-less communication. To facilitate an accurate and an efficient certificate revocation, we propose a reliant model, wherein every node is associated with reliance, which is a measure of its goodness. The model, not only merits good behaviour, but also punishes any misbehaviour. When the node is perceived to be unreliable, by at least more than half of the neighbouring nodes, an accusation packet is forwarded to the Certificate Authority whereby the certificate of the accused node is cancelled thus enabling a reliable multihop transmission. The performance measures of the proposed model are compared with the previous revocation techniques. Results demonstrate that the proposed scheme is effective than the existing schemes.