An efficient anonymous authentication mechanism for delay tolerant networks

Security and privacy are crucial to the wide deployments of delay tolerant networks. Without security and privacy guarantees, people are reluctant to accept such a new network paradigm. To address the security and privacy issues in delay tolerant networks, in this paper, based on ID-based ring signatures and Merkle hash tree techniques, we present a new efficient anonymous authentication mechanism. The newly proposed mechanism not only achieves good security properties, including authentication, anonymity and confidentiality, but also has strong robustness and high efficiency.