Trustroam: A Novel Blockchain-Based Cross-Domain Authentication Scheme for Wi-Fi Access

Abstract

Cross-domain roaming in Wi-Fi networks is ubiquitous and the frequency of global roaming of users has increased dramatically in recent years. To ensure network security, it is important to authenticate users belonging to different domains. Existing solutions like eduroam leverage a centralized and hierarchical architecture to authenticate users, which leads to serious performance and security issues in practice. In this paper, we propose Trustroam, a novel cross-domain authentication scheme in Wi-Fi networks based on blockchain. Different from traditional hierarchical solutions, Trustroam authenticates users and servers in a distributed and anonymous manner, avoiding several serious problems such as single point of failure and privacy leakage. Through the distributed consensus mechanism and mutual authentication, our scheme is highly fault tolerant to handle compromised server attacks. We implemented the Trustroam prototype in a real testbed. Experimental and evaluation results show that our scheme is superior to existing hierarchical solutions in terms of scalability, security and privacy preserving. Besides, Trustroam is an effective solution that can be conveniently and incrementally deployed in practical environments.