Securing Information through Trust Management in Wireless Networks

Wireless networks are prone to certain information security threats that are either unique, or more pronounced for them due to the open air nature of the channel, bandwidth limitations and constantly changing topology. The concept of trust management, i.e., establishment of trust combined with trust monitoring, can be useful for mitigating the consequences of a substantial number of these threats. In this paper we introduce schemes for trust based secure information management for wireless networks. We outline trust management for both centralauthority-assisted (base-assisted) and independent adhoc networks. For base-assisted networks, we define a trust based admission control scheme, use intent graphs for trust monitoring, and a peer monitoring scheme based on actual condition review. For ad-hoc networks, we define the concept of logical and physical trust domains and introduce the idea of using domain heads for trust management.