Abstract
Due to the lack of infrastructure and vulnerability of wireless links, security in ad hoc networks is considered to be much more difficult than in traditional hierarchical networks. Building the trust relationship between entities is a fundamental problem in ad hoc networks, since the availability of servers, which distribute trust certificates, is not guaranteed. Furthermore, the existence of any trusted server might not be assumed either. Therefore, the commonly used key distribution center (KDC) and certification authority (CA) are not applicable in such highly autonomous environments. In this paper, we propose a scheme for the distribution of trust certificates, which is completely distributed and adaptive to mobility. Our scheme is based on the swarm intelligence paradigm, which has been used for routing both in wired and wireless networks. Our simulations in ns-2 show that it performs very well in ad hoc environments.