A secure prepaid micropayment scheme for wireless mesh networks

Official URL: http://192.168.1.20/record=b1304377 (Table of Contents)

Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) is an evolving multi-hop, ubiquitous and high speed networking technology. In this thesis, we proposed a secure micropayment scheme for network access in WMNs. The main motivation is that the operators are not considered as fully trusted entities in our scheme; the clients control their balance with their operators. In this way, none of the system entities can behave dishonestly about the amount of services provided and obtained. Our proposed payment scheme is a prepaid one. The users obtain connection cards for getting service. Connection card issuer, which is a trusted third party, generates the connection cards. Each connection card includes tokens. These tokens are generated as a hash chain which is obtained by hashing an initial value (IV) several times. Hash functions are one way and irreversible cryptographic functions. The tokens are consumed backwards. Therefore, it is not feasible to generate unused tokens from an already used token. This property is the main enabler for the security of our scheme. We have conducted simulations for performance evaluation of the proposed scheme. Our results show that in a network with 300 clients, the average authentication completion time becomes less than 1 second even if all the clients send their connection request at the same time.