Securely-entrusted multi-topology routing for community networks

Abstract

Routing in open and decentralized networks relies on coopera- tion despite the participation of unknown (alien) nodes and node administrators pursuing heterogeneous trust and security goals. Living use cases for such environments are given by community- mesh networks due to their open structure and decentralized management and ownership. However, despite many active work in the field of routing security for mesh and MANET networks, practical solutions enabling a secured but decentralized trust management are still missing, leaving nowadays existing com- munity networks vulnerable to various cooperation attacks and seriously challenged by the obligation to find consensus within an increasing user size and diversity. This work presents the design, implementation and analysis of a routing protocol that enables cryptographically secured negotiation and establishment of concurrent and individually- trusted routing topologies for infrastructure-less networks with- out relying on any central management. Benchmarking results, based on our initial implementation and tested on real and very cheap (10-Euro, Linux SoC) embedded routers, quantify the scalability of our approach supporting networks with hundreds of nodes and despite being based on supposedly CPU-expensive asymmetric cryptography.