Safe and irrefutable decentralized communication: Bringing non-repudiation to mesh networks

Securing digital communications is a major preoccupation for industry and academia, and a great number of techniques have been successfully developed to achieve that goal. The predominant model for digital communication is that which relies on trusted third-parties, either as local servers or as cloud services. Meanwhile, emerging technologies such as internet-of-things are set to broadcast growing amounts of potentially sensitive information thereby making centralized architectures problematic for privacy and performance reasons and making decentralized networks ever more relevant. However, these third-parties play an important role in securing brokered communications and are essential in providing Authentication and Non-Repudiation according to current models. Clearly, such an approach cannot be used in peer-to-peer networks and there is need for a simple model applicable in fully decentralized networks to provide Non-Repudiation. This document proposes such a model, presents an implementation and discusses its application, particularly pertaining to implementing irrefutable trustless transaction mechanisms - similar to blockchain - in the realm of limited resources. © 2017 Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM.