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Securely-Entrusted Multi-Topology Routing for Community Networks

Abstract—
Routing in open and decentralized networks relies on coop-
eration despite the participation of unknown 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 attacks and seriously
challenged by the obligation to find consensus on the trustability
of participants 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.
Index Terms—routing, trust, decentralized security, multi-
topology, cooperation, mesh networks, community networks.