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Mobile Ad hoc networks are composed of self organizing, multi-relaying nodes that do not rely on a fixed infrastructure and are lack of any centralized control. These characteristics make it to suffer from ineffective network performance and security attacks. Clustering have been devoted to organize all the nodes in mobile ad hoc network into a grouping architecture because it can provide basic levels network performance. However, in order to safeguard the clustering from malicious attacks, the node authentication in clustering is also an important issue. Since the nodes have a limitation of battery power, traditional solutions require each node to possess a pair of public and private keys like RSA which are not appropriate for them. In this paper, an efficient clustering authentication mechanism for mobile ad hoc networks is proposed to aim for the efficiency of certificate and authentication. For the purpose, each node in the same cluster have its private key respectively and share a common public key to reduce the authentication overhead. According to the security analysis and efficiency evaluation, the proposed mechanism is robust with certificate and authentication and is lightweight in terms of computational and communication requirements. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]