Abstract
We present a family of certification methods with applications to attribute certification, which in turn has ample applications to ad hoc networks by way of the use of centrally managed recommendation mechanisms. Our construction is based on a Merkle tree consisting of subtrees, each of which corresponds to some aspect of an attribute. We study how the ordering of these subtrees can impact the cost of rep-resenting, maintaining, and verifying attribute certificates. We describe the applicability of our construction to vehicle ad hoc networks, detail our proposed methods, and evaluate their suitability to the proposed settings.

Keywords
Attribute authority, certificate, hash graphs, light-weight cryptography, recommendation, spatial Merkle tree