Title: Sea of Lights: Practical Device-to-Device Security Bootstrapping in the Dark,
Abstract: Practical solutions to bootstrap security in today's information and
communication systems critically depend on centralized services for
authentication as well as key and trust management. This is particularly true
for mobile users. Identity providers such as Google or Facebook have active
user bases of two billion each, and the subscriber number of mobile operators
exceeds five billion unique users as of early 2018. If these centralized
services go completely `dark' due to natural or man made disasters, large scale
blackouts, or country-wide censorship, the users are left without practical
solutions to bootstrap security on their mobile devices. Existing distributed
solutions, for instance, the so-called web-of-trust are not sufficiently
lightweight. Furthermore, they support neither cross-application on mobile
devices nor strong protection of key material using hardware security modules.
We propose Sea of Lights(SoL), a practical lightweight scheme for bootstrapping
device-to-device security wirelessly, thus, enabling secure distributed
self-organized networks. It is tailored to operate `in the dark' and provides
strong protection of key material as well as an intuitive means to build a
lightweight web-of-trust. SoL is particularly well suited for local or urban
operation in scenarios such as the coordination of emergency response, where it
helps containing/limiting the spreading of misinformation. As a proof of
concept, we implement SoL in the Android platform and hence test its
feasibility on real mobile devices. We further evaluate its key performance
aspects using simulation.