A Trustworthy Path Discovery Mechanism in Ubiquitous Networks

With the evolution of information communication technology, a large number of new applications appear, resulting in kinds of new accessing equipments to be deployed. Since the characteristics of randomness, dynamic and unpredictability of their positions, securely discovering these new equipments is one of a primary challenges to guarantee the security issues for these new applications. Traditional path discovery protocols cannot be directly borrowed and applied onto new service models due to the aforementioned inherent vulnerabilities. In this paper, we propose a Public key infrastructure-based (PKI-based) Trustworthy path discovery mechanism (TPDM), which is further implemented by trustworthy node discovery and neighbor node discovery protocols for new service models. As a result, a source node can discover a trustworthy path to the destination node and each intermediate node can also detect its neighbor nodes. Security analysis and evaluation results indicate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed mechanism.