Distributed authentication for services commercialization in ad hoc networks

Users' authentication and authorization to services access are two important challenges standing against the deployment of ad hoc networks by network operators and services commercialization using these networks. In this paper, we consider ad hoc networks real deployment, in which advanced services are provided to users (mainly multimedia services, ex, music and video transfer and sharing, audio-visual guidance during festivals), considering that the services are provided by dedicated ad hoc nodes playing the role of application servers (application providers). We proposed a novel solution allowing, the mutual authentication of each user with respect to the network operator/service provider, the authentication of each ad hoc node with respect to its neighbors during the ad hoc user access to the network, and the authorization of each user to access the required services. Our proposed solution employs a Kerberos authentication model, extending it to the ad hoc network environment. We provided a security analysis of this solution showing its resistance against a number of attacks and we implemented it analyzed its performance in an ad hoc network test-bed, mainly in term of authentication delay compared to traditional authentication approaches.