Trustworthy Accounting for Wireless LAN Sharing Communities

Abstract. The Peer-to-Peer Wireless Network Confederation (P2PWNC) is designed to be an open self-organizing Wireless LAN (WLAN) roaming association where users from one WLAN can access all other WLANs belonging to the same P2PWNC. Unlike other WLAN roaming schemes, P2PWNC is open to all types of WLANs and particularly to residential networks owned by individual householders. Without an identity certifying authority, trustworthy accounting of transactions in the P2PWNC is challenging, but accounting is necessary in order to enforce the basic P2PWNC ‘rule of reciprocity’. We show that even though the P2PWNC accounting mechanism and its purpose-built Public Key Infrastructure are open to Sybil attacks, there exists a user authentication algorithm that excludes all free riders and that can also make the percentage of unfair exclusions it causes very small simply by using more system memory. Keywords. self-organized security, WLAN roaming, Sybil attack, peer-to-peer

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: EUROPKI
• Authors: Elias C. Efstathiou, George C. Polyzos
• Keywords: EUROPKI 2004, Peer-to-Peer Wireless Network, Security Privacy, Sybil Attack, WLAN Roaming Schemes