Global Grassroots WiFi Sharing

Abstract — Access point sharing communities are an attractive solution for low-cost global mobile Internet access. However, existing communities all require a central authority in form of a certificate authority or an authentication server. In this paper, we show how such a community network can be created without a central entity. We introduce a mechanism called remote station approval; a host can use it to offer Internet access without requiring a central instance and without the risk of legal responsibility for the guests ’ traffic. We discuss how our system preserves the anonymity of its users and present a prototype implementation and some first performance figures. I