Certificate-Based, Disruption-Tolerant Authentication System with Automatic CA Certificate Distribution for Eduroam

Eduroam, the world-wide roaming system for research and educational institutions, has several shortcomings such as unstable and slow user authentication and weakness against network/proxy failures. We propose a disruption-tolerant authentication architecture based on the combination of certificate-based authentication and the centralized authentication system called Delegate Authentication System (DEAS) to improve the performance and stability of eduroam. Being able to automatically retrieve CA (Certificate Authority) certificates and Certificate Revocation Lists, the proposed system can significantly reduce the authentication request exchanges across countries and is tolerant of temporary service interruptions of the network as well as of RADIUS proxies.