Fixing Security Flaws of URSA Ad hoc Signature Scheme
Jeong Hyun Yi · Information Security and Cryptology · 2007
Ad hoc networks enable efficient resource aggregation in decentralized manner, and are inherently scalable and fault-tolerant since they do not depend on any centralized authority. However, lack of a centralized authority prompts many security-related challenges. Moreover, the dynamic topology change in which network nodes frequently join and leave adds a further complication in designing effective and efficient security mechanism. Security services for ad hoc networks need to be provided in a scalable and fault-tolerant manner while allowing for membership change of network nodes. In this paper, we investigate distributed certification mechanisms using a threshold cryptography in a way that the functions of a CA(Certification Authority) are distributed into the network nodes themselves and certain number of nodes jointly issue public key certificates to future joining nodes. In the process, we summarize one interesting report [5] in which the recently proposed RSA-based ad hoc signature scheme, called URSA, contains unfortunate yet serious security flaws. We then propose new scheme by fixing their security flaws.