Accumulative Secure Group Association in an Ad-Hoc and Ubiquitous Network (Version 3.0)

The increased popularity of mobile devices, such as laptops, mobile phones, tablets, accessory devices, and more, brings new challenges in the area of network security in the ubiquitous environment, where ad-hoc networks may be formed using mobile devices. There has been little discussion of setting up secure connections among a group of devices. A number of group security protocols has been proposed; however, these have tended to focus on a scenario whereby all devices must be located in one place at one time. In this paper, we describe a new secure group association method that associates mobile devices in an accumulative manner, so it does not require all group members to be physically present. It utilizes digital certification and extends the concept of out-of-band channels, through which the authentication data can be transferred using human user involvement. We have implemented a prototype system and conducted a comparative user experiment to demonstrate viability of the accumulative association.