Improvement on the Multihop Shareholder Discovery for Threshold Secret Sharing in MANETs

The collaboration of at least a threshold number of secret shareholders in a threshold secret sharing scheme is a strict requirement to ensure its intended functionality. Due to its promising characteristics, such a scheme has been proposed to solve a range of security problems in mobile ad hoc networks. However, discovering a sufficient number of secret shareholders in such dynamic and unpredictable networks is not easy. In this paper, we propose a more efficient shareholder discovery mechanism compared to our previous work. The discovery process is performed in a multihop fashion to adapt to the mobile ad hoc network environment. We introduce batch extension that gradually extends the shareholders' collaboration boundary by more than one hop at a time around the service requestor, to find at least the threshold number of the unknown shareholders. Through the batch extension, reply aggregation is applicable, hence reducing the redundancy use of reply routes, decreasing the required packet transmission, and lessening the service delay, compared to the previously proposed mechanism. Our simulation results show that, with the appropriate batch size, the latest mechanism is more efficient with an insignificant increase of control overhead.