Authenticated public key distribution scheme without trusted third party

Public key authentication is necessary to prevent a valid public key of a user from being compromised by a malicious user. Namely, if it is not provided, an adversary can read all encrypted messages between a sender and a receiver by substituting the public key of the receiver with her public key. In general, a certificate issued from and digitally signed by a publicly trusted certificate authority (CA) guarantees public key authentication under the assumption that all users can get the public key of the CA to verify the validity of certificates, i.e., the signatures of the CA. The assumption is practical and widely used in the real world. However, if the CA is down by a system faults or destroyed by a terror or a war, the assumption can not be preserved. In this paper, we propose a simple and practical scheme for public key authentication without any trusted third party. The scheme basically uses a message authentication code (MAC) taking a short random value as a key to authenticate the exchanged public keys. Our scheme also can be adopted in the environments such as ad-hoc or ubiquitous in which it is hard to settle a publicly trusted authority.