Suicide for the common good

Abstract

We consider the problem of credential revocation in self-organizing systems. In the absence of a common trusted authority, reaching a decision is slow, expensive and prone to manipulation. We propose a radical, new strategy--- suicide for the common good ---which drastically simplifies the decision-making process and revocation orders. Our mechanism is fully decentralized, incurs low communication and storage overhead, enables fast removal of misbehaving nodes, and is ideally suited to highly mobile networks.