CEBAC: A Decentralized Cooperation Enforcement Based Access Control Framework in MANETs

Prevention of unauthorized access to services in mobile ad hoc networks is a more sophisticated problem than access control in other networks, due to interconnection facilities and lack of any fixed network infrastructure in such networks. Therefore regarding the nature of these networks, controlling access to services should be in a decentralized manner providing good performance and preserving network security. In this paper, we propose a decentralized Cooperation Enforcement Based Access Control (CEBAC) framework for mobile ad hoc networks. CEBAC comprises several groups of Service Authorizers, each issuing Credentials for access to a specific kind of services. The User Authorization for using services, besides the internal possibly traditional access control model of Service Providers, is governed by the specific threshold-based access control scheme introduced in CEBAC. In addition, a punitive mechanism is applied to mitigate the selfish behavior of authorizers and motivate them to cooperate.