PryGuard: A secure distributed authentication protocol for pervasive computing environment

Abstract

Handheld devices have become so commonplace nowadays that they are an integral part of our everyday life. Proliferation of these mobile handheld devices equipped with wide range of capabilities has bolstered widespread popularity of pervasive computing applications. In such applications many devices interact with each other by forming ad hoc wireless networks. The necessity of such unavoidable inter-device dependency along with volatile nature of connectivity and the lack of a fixed infrastructure for authentication and authorization, devices are susceptible and vulnerable to malicious active and passive snoopers. If a device registers a malicious device as its valid neighbor, the security and privacy of entire system might be jeopardized. Such sensitivity to malevolent activity necessitates the need for a robust mechanism to maintain a list of valid devices that will help to prevent malicious devices from authenticating successfully. In this paper, we present the feasibility of using a decentralized protocol in order to prevent malicious devices from participating illicitly into the ad hoc networks. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.