Distributed access control for consumer operated mobile ad-hoc networks

Abstract

We propose a concept for realizing access control in mobile ad-hoc networks to exclude nodes that do not contribute to the provision of network services from using them. Each node observes the behavior of its neighbors in order to build up opinions about their willingness to take part in different network activities. In turn, service is provided only to nodes that have positive opinions about them. A precondition for assigning opinions to nodes is having a means for authentication; we rely on a web-of-trust structure for this, where all nodes can issue certificates for others after they have verified their identities. A proactive certificate management system makes it possible - as the presented evaluation results show - to find optimal certificate chains between given keys and to retrieve the needed certificates quickly.