Design and implementation of a proactive distributed authentication framework (PDAF)

Abstract

We are designing authentication framework for a regional network with concerns on fast authentication and disaster robustness. To achieve this goal, we previously proposed a proactive and distributed authentication framework (PDAF). In this paper, to enhance the robustness of PDAF, we add temporary registration and authentication procedures in a disaster scenario and the distributed regional network key server (RNKS) mechanism. Meanwhile, we optimize PDAF messaging through reducing redundancy to improve the performance. The proposed PDAF is a fully distributed design, which is intrinsically more robust than the existing authentication framework. In particular, we implement the PDAF over an existing regional network and measure the performance of PDAF. This shows that network scale and offered traffic load do not influence the PDAF's authentication time, which is usually around 31 ms under our experiment environment, because neighboring networking devices directly authenticate end devices.