SOMA-E: Self-organized mesh authentication - Extended

Community mesh networks have emerged rapidly in every metropolis around the world, however many of the security methods applied are counter-intuitive and usually disrupt the autonomous characteristics of the mesh nodes. In SOMA we present a structured Peer-to-Peer solution providing authentication service based on a scalable, self-organized and fully distributed Web-of-Trust. Our proposal is a hybrid Public Key Infrastructure build on top of Chord, allowing each agent to place its own trust policy while keeping the autonomous characteristics the nodes intact. Our goal is to create a large-scale authentication system for mesh networks without the need of a Trusted Third Party. We leave the decision of whom to trust in each agent independently taking advantage of the overlay to alleviate the shortcomings of traditional Web-of-Trust models. This is achieved by using the overlay as a meta-structure to infer trust relationships providing a policy-based system, which is further enhanced with a Bayesian reputation based model so as to cope with the different challenges posed by the distributed nature of the system. The possible attacks and limitations of our proposal are also investigated and discussed.