TUA: A Novel Compromise-Resilient Authentication Architecture for Wireless Mesh Networks

User authentication is essential in service-oriented communication networks to identify and reject any unauthorized network access. The state-of-the-art practice in securing wireless networks is based on the authentication, authorization and accounting (AAA) framework where one or multiple identical and duplicated AAA servers are adopted to authenticate mobile users (MUs), handle authorization requests, and collect accounting data. However, the conventional AAA framework cannot tolerate a server compromise event due to misuse, misconfiguration, and malicious access, etc., which may cause serious damages and resource abuses to the network operation. In this paper, we propose a novel design paradigm toward a compromiseresilient authentication architecture in service-oriented wireless mesh networks (WMNs) based on the (t, n) threshold signature technique, termed Threshold User Authentication (TUA) scheme. With the TUA scheme, only t or more out of n AAA servers in the WMN can cooperativel...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: TWC
• Authors: Xiaodong Lin, Rongxing Lu, Pin-Han Ho, Xuemin Shen, Zhenfu Cao
• Keywords: AAA Servers, Authentication, TWC 2008, User Authentication