Social networks for certification in Vehicular Disruption Tolerant Networks

Vehicular Disruption Tolerant Networks appear due to the search of information by drivers, which build mobile ad hoc networks that may suffer from long interruptions. This paper proposes a certification mechanism by means of social networks, enabling cars to share keys through direct contacts between two acquaintances that warrant their identity, so they sign a reciprocal certificate. Certificates signed by a third party can be validated if the user´s public key is available to the other party. Further, the reputation mechanism can identify certificates of trusted users. The evaluation shows the behavior of a vehicular network that uses certificates in social networks as cryptographic security mechanism to establish a degree of trust between users.