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Sye Loong Keoh
Imperial College London
United Kingdom
Emil Lupu
Imperial College London
United Kingdom
Morris Sloman
Imperial College London
United Kingdom
An ad-hoc network is perceived as a community of autonomous devices that interconnect with each other. Ad-hoc networks have dynamic topologies and cannot rely on a continuous connection to the Internet. In addition, users do not usually have a priori knowledge about each other, this introduces difficult security issues when attempting to provide authentication, membership management and access control. The current research challenge is to devise a security framework to establish and manage ad-hoc communities in terms of how one can participate in the collaboration, what resources and services that are needed to form the community, and who can access the provided services. In this paper, we propose a novel policy-based security framework to facilitate the establishment, evolution and management of mobile ad-hoc communities. Security policies are defined explicitly in order to regulate the behaviour of users. A community specification called doctrine defines a set of participants in terms of roles, as well as the policies governing their behaviour. Based on the doctrine, we propose a set of security protocols to bootstrap the community, to manage the membership, and to govern the access to the services provided by the participants. We have studied the impact of mobility on the proposed security protocols and observed that the protocol is robust to changes in the network topology.
Keywords: Ad-hoc networks, policy