Maintaining integrity and reputation in content offloading

The growing demand for mobile content has increased the burden on cellular network providers. To this end, mobile content offloading approaches aim to offer a relief of overloaded cellular network infrastructures via local content exchanges between mobile devices. A core assumption of proposed approaches is the voluntary, honest, and altruistic participation of devices or their owners. This dependency offers malicious participants an avenue of mounting denial-of-service attacks by lying about the content they have or by providing forged content, thereby negating the principal advantages of mobile offloading. Furthermore, without mutual authentication between the participants, there are no means of identification and thereby no chance to report or to stop abuse. In this paper, we thus propose MIRCO, an approach that adds integrity protection to the offloaded content, authentication for participants, and a commitment to the exchange of content between devices. We embed the aforementioned techniques into the offloading process and implement and evaluate our approach using Android smartphones with regard to time and energy overhead. Our results show that MIRCO only adds negligible overhead to content exchanges, thus enabling a feasible and accountable content offloading approach.