Achieving Collaborative Wi-Fi Sharing without Changing Current Technologies

There are still many issues in order to achieve collaborative Wi-Fi sharing: the legal liability of the sharer in many countries with illegal download monitoring is a clear barrier to users´ Wi-Fi network sharing, worldwide strong authentication is still not available, data access costs are still high in some situations (mobility when going over a monthly subscription quota, roaming...), and overall there is no appropriate incentives to share between the users. After Wi-Fi authentication and association between the client and the gateway, we propose to combine a simple trust event structure based on the SECURE trust model to exclude any malicious users with a well-tailored cooperation incentives schema to mitigate all the above issues without having to install new hardware anywhere or to flash or root Wi-Fi sharing devices. We validate our proposal with a threat model analysis and evaluate the incentives with real users´ survey feedbacks and cost/benefit analysis.