BARTER: Profile Model Exchange for Behavior-Based Access Control and Communication Security in MANETs

There is a considerable body of literature and technology that provides access control and security of communication for Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs) based on cryptographic authentication technologies and protocols. We introduce a new method of granting access and securing communication in a MANET environment to augment, not replace, existing techniques. Previous approaches grant access to the MANET, or to its services, merely by means of an authenticated identity or a qualified role. We present BARTER, a framework that, in addition, requires nodes to exchange a model of their behavior to grant access to the MANET and to assess the legitimacy of their subsequent communication. This framework forces the nodes not only to say who or what they are, but also how they behave. BARTER will continuously run membership acceptance and update protocols to give access to and accept traffic only from nodes whose behavior model is considered “normal” according to the behavior model of the nodes in the MANET. We implement and experimentally evaluate the merger between BARTER and other cryptographic technologies and show that BARTER can implement a fully distributed automatic access control and update with small cryptographic costs. Although the methods proposed involve the use of content-based anomaly detection models, the generic infrastructure implementing the methodology may utilize any behavior model. Even though the experiments are implemented for MANETs, the idea of model exchange for access control can be applied to any type of network.