Utility-based cooperative decision in cooperative authentication

In mobile networks, cooperative authentication is an efficient way to recognize false identities and messages. However, an attacker can track the location of cooperative mobile nodes by monitoring their communications. Moreover, mobile nodes consume their own resources when cooperating with other nodes in the process of authentication. These two factors cause selfish mobile nodes not to actively participate in authentication. In this paper, a bargaining-based game for cooperative authentication is proposed to help nodes decide whether to participate in authentication or not, and our strategy guarantees that mobile nodes participating in cooperative authentication can obtain the maximum utility, all at an acceptable cost. We obtain Nash equilibrium in static complete information games. To address the problem of nodes not knowing the utility of other nodes, incomplete information games for cooperative authentication are established. We also develop an algorithm based on incomplete information games to maximize every node's utility. The simulation results demonstrate that our strategy has the ability to guarantee authentication probability and increase the number of successful authentications.