Trust Management in Resource Constraint Networks

There are numerous environments or situations where a computer network has one or more constraints. Impact of these constraints can range from minimal user inconveniences to catastrophic reduction of capabilities. These constraints allow availability of information at the cost of abandoning the safety and reliability of traditional routing and security protocols. A number of environments in which such networks are needed include those present in military battlefields, first responder missions or remote environments. Resource Constraint Networks (RCN) are a class of networks capable of working in such austere environments. Delay Tolerant, Wireless Sensor, and some mobile and mesh ad-hoc networks fall under the broader definition of RCN. In order to provide additional information assurance (IA) security services above information availability such as integrity, confidentiality, and authentication require significant modification to traditional routing and security protocols. One method is to manage trust in a distributed manner in order to make valid trust values available to a node. Using them, a node can then make decisions on how and when to forward a message through the network. While not traditional authentication, distributed trust can be used as a probabilistic proxy, and allow for more secure transmission of information from source to destination in a RCN. The use of path information in a DTN allows for malicious node detection. We show how using erasure coding, complete path information, and inferences assist in better identifying malicious nodes in a DTN. Keywords—Resource Constraint Networks, Delay Tolerant Networks, Distributed Trust Management, Discrete Event Simulations