A Secure Identity-based Deniable Authentication Protocol for MANETs

A deniable authentication (DA) protocol plays a vital role to provide security and privacy of the mobile nodes in a mobile ad hoc network (MANET). In recent years, a number of similar works have been proposed, but most of them experience heavy computational and communication overhead. Further, most of these protocols are not secure against different attacks. To address these concerns, we devised an identity-based deniable authentication (IBDA) protocol with adequate security and efficiency. The proposed IBDA protocol is mainly designed for MANETs, where the mobile devices are resource-limited. The proposed IBDA protocol used the elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) and identity-based cryptosystem (IBC). The security of our IBDA protocol depends on the elliptic curve discrete logarithm (ECDL) problem and bilinear Diffie-Hellman (BDH) problem.

I. Introduction

In a mobile ad hoc network (MANET), a mobile device is allow to communicate with another mobile device dynamically by forwarding the data from one device to another device without the help of any router or access point and can create a network on the fly [1] – [4] . There are various applications of MANET like disaster rescue, army tactical, and healthcare [5] – [7] . During the communication between two mobile devices, the networks must provide security and privacy. The deniable authentication protocol is a security primitive for MANETs and is used in many scenarios such as secure message exchange, electronic voting, etc. There exist many deniable authentication protocols in the literature [8] – [13] . The deniable authentication protocols include two important properties which are: (i) the receivers can only verify the source of an intended message, and (ii) the receiver is unable to establish evidence to a third party that the source of an intended message has sent the message.