Autonomous Trust Establishment

T.Jiang and J. S. Baras

2nd International Network Optimization Conference, Lisbon, Portugal, March 20-23, 2005.

Abstract

Trust establishment in networks is the essential foundation for follow-on security mechanisms, such as key management and secure transmission. In this paper, we concentrate on self-organized, distributed and resource-constraint networks which pose formidable challenges on trust establishment due to lack of infrastructure and centralized servers. We model our trust establishment strategy as a local voting scheme and discuss its long run behavior. More specifically, we investigate the dynamic evolution of trust within the network, i.e. how trust spreads among nodes, via analyzing its convergence behavior. By theoretical analysis based on graph theory, we also find the conditions under which trust spreads to a maximum set of nodes and parameters that speed up or slow down this transition.