Security is one of the major issues in MANETs. Their natural characteristics make them vulnerable to numerous severe attacks. It is widely acknowledged that cryptography provides a set of strong techniques against most vulnerabilities. Several cryptographic mechanisms for MANETs can be found in the literature. Among them, identity-based cryptographic mechanisms and key management schemes are proposed to simplify key management and to reduce the memory storage cost. This article presents the most important ID-based key management schemes, discussing their approaches, strengths, and weaknesses, and comparing their main features. It also presents the main ID- based key management application fields on MANETs. In this way it can be useful for users and researchers as a starting point on ID-based key management and its possible uses in MANETs.

The growing complexity and dependability requirements of hardware, software, and networks demand efficient techniques for discovering disruptive behavior in those systems. Comparison-based diagnosis is a realistic approach to detect faulty units based on the outputs of tasks executed by system units. This survey integrates the vast amount of research efforts that have been produced in this field, from the earliest theoretical models to new promising applications. Key results also include the quantitative evaluation of a relevant reliability metric—the diagnosability—of several popular interconnection network topologies. Relevant diagnosis algorithms are also described. The survey aims at clarifying and uncovering the potential of this technology, which can be applied to improve the dependability of diverse complex computer systems.

This paper addresses the problem of the identification of faulty units in symmetric systems under the diagnostic model proposed by Barsi, Grandoni and Maestrini (hence called the BGM model). The paper introduces and evaluates an algorithm named Diagnosis Algorithm for Symmetric Systems under the BGM model (DABS). It is shown that DABS provides a diagnosis unconditionally correct although possibly incomplete. A measure of diagnosis incompleteness IDeg(t) has been defined as the quotient between the number of suspect units (i.e. the units that DABS is unable to identify as either good or faulty) and the number of system units. IDeg(t) is evaluated over the set of syndromes deriving from at most t faults under the BGM model. A general approach to the evaluation of IDeg(t) in symmetric systems is introduced, and tight bounds to IDeg(t) are derived for square toroidal grids and hypercubes. This bound is O(t/n) in the case of square toroidal grids of n units.