Abstract
Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) have been attracting much interest in both academia and industry communities due to their potential applications in a wide range of areas. However, the salient characteristics of MANETs, in particular the absence of infrastructure, mobility and the constrained resources of mobile devices, present enormous challenges when designing the security mechanism in this environment. As an important component of a key management mechanism, an efficient key revocation scheme, which revokes cryptographic keys of malicious nodes and isolate them from the network, is crucial for the security and robustness of MANETs. In this chapter, we provide a survey of key revocation schemes in pure general-purpose MANETs and vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), highly successful specializations of (pure) MANETs. We notice that revocation is closely related to the kind of trust among the users as well as between the users and the authorities, which can vary from one application to another. Therefore, there is not a universal solution for key revocation which is applicable to all the scenarios where MANETs are used. Different approaches should be employed based on the requirements and the characteristics of target applications.
