A new method for sharing the public keys in opportunistic networks

© 2018, Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature. Opportunistic Networks do not have a fundamental infrastructure, and different nodes in these networks have the role of a sender, receiver and a router. Intermediate nodes should route messages to neighbors and they should extract sufficient information for this purpose while the content of the message is still hidden. In order to achieve this aim, messages should be encrypted. While there is not a constant path between two specific nodes in OppNet, it is not possible to use traditional solutions such as a trusted third party for sharing the public key. In this paper, a new confidentiality structure is proposed in order to encrypt the messages and sharing nodes’ public key in Opportunistic Networks. By this new structure, intermediate nodes may route messages while they are not able to extract payload of a message.