Abstract

Cities around the world are currently considering building infrastructure for Wi-Fi. In urban areas, resident-operated Wi-Fi access points (APs) are dense enough to achieve ubiquitous Internet access, provided we can induce the hosts to provide guest Wi-Fi access. However, sharing Wi-Fi involves taking on responsibility for the guest’s actions. Our main contribution is a novel mechanism to handoff this responsibility to a trusted point by tunneling the guest’s packets through it. Using this as a primitive, we show how to architect a citywide co-operative for safely sharing Wi-Fi with legitimate guests. We offer this as an economically viable alternative to investing millions in new infrastructure.