Peer-to-peer assisted security context transfer for mobile terminals

This paper presents a distributed authentication architecture based on peer-to-peer networking paradigms to minimise the delays in authenticating and authorising mobile nodes roaming across different wireless networks. The fundamental principle is to provide a mechanism to shift elements required for authentication closer to the mobile node´s current point of access thus reducing the need for interaction with the home network´s authentication, authorisation and accounting (AAA) servers. We propose to harness the power of self-organising peer-to-peer networking principles to provide an efficient, reliable and low overhead infrastructure for securely transporting and managing the mobile user´s security context and information as they roam between foreign networks.