Small worlds in security systems: an analysis of the PGP certificate graph

  • Authors:

  • Srdjan Čapkun;Levente Buttyán;Jean-Pierre Hubaux

  • Affiliations:

  • Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland;Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland;Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2002 workshop on New security paradigms
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

We propose a new approach to securing self-organized mobile ad hoc networks. In this approach, security is achieved in a fully self-organized manner; by this we mean that the security system does not require any kind of certification authority or centralized server, even for the initialization phase. In our work, we were inspired by PGP [15] because its operation relies solely on the acquaintances between users. We show that the small-world phenomenon naturally emerges in the PGP system as a consequence of the self-organization of users. We show this by studying the PGP certificate graph properties and by quantifying its small-world characteristics. We argue that the certificate graphs of self-organized security systems will exhibit a similar small-world phenomenon, and we provide a way to model self-organized certificate graphs. The results of the PGP certificate graph analysis and graph modelling can be used to build new self-organized security systems and to test the performance of the existing proposals. In this work, we refer to such an example.