PROSEARCH: a protocol to simplify path discovery in critical scenarios

  • Authors:
  • Cristina Satizábal;Rafael Páez;Jordi Forné

  • Affiliations:
  • Telematics Engineering Department. Technical University of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain;Telematics Engineering Department. Technical University of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain;Telematics Engineering Department. Technical University of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain

  • Venue:
  • CRITIS'06 Proceedings of the First international conference on Critical Information Infrastructures Security
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

Authentication is a strong requirement for critical information systems, and Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is widely used to provide this service. Peer-to-peer PKIs are quite dynamic and certification paths can be built although part of the infrastructure is temporarily unreachable, which is quite common after disasters or network attacks. However, certification path discovery is one of the main drawbacks of peer-to-peer PKIs that strongly affects their scalability. We propose a protocol to build a virtual hierarchical PKI from a peer-to-peer PKI, since certification path construction in hierarchical PKIs is straightforward. Our protocol does not require to issue new certificates, facilitates the certification path discovery process and it is adaptable to the characteristics of users with limited processing and storage capacity. Results show that the execution time of this protocol is short in critical scenarios.