Peer-to-peer assisted security context transfer for mobile terminals

Abstract

This paper presents a distributed authentication architecture based on peer-to-peer networking paradigms to minimise the delays in authenticating and authorising mobile nodes roaming across different wireless networks. The fundamental principle is to provide a mechanism to shift elements required for authentication closer to the mobile node's current point of access thus reducing the need for interaction with the home network's authentication, authorisation and accounting (AAA) servers. We propose to harness the power of self-organising peer-to-peer networking principles to provide an efficient, reliable and low overhead infrastructure for securely transporting and managing the mobile user's security context and information as they roam between foreign networks.