PEACE: A Policy-Based Establishment of Ad-hoc Communities

Ad-hoc networks are perceived as communities of autonomous devices that interconnect with each other. Typically, they have dynamic topologies and cannot rely on a continuous connection to the Internet. Users' devices often do not have a priori knowledge of each other and cannot rely upon pre-existing shared information. This introduces difficult security issues when attempting to provide authentication, membership management and access control. Designing a framework which allows the secure establishment and management of ad-hoc communities remains a significant challenge. In this paper, we propose a novel policybased security framework to facilitate the establishment, evolution and management of mobile ad-hoc networks. We introduce a community specification, called doctrine, which defines the roles of the participants in the community, the characteristics that participants must exhibit in order to be eligible to play a role, as well as the policies governing their behaviour withi...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: ACSAC
• Authors: Sye Loong Keoh, Emil Lupu, Morris Sloman
• Keywords: ACSAC 2004, Ad-Hoc Networks, Difficult Security Issues, Pre-existing Shared Information, Security Privacy