The Case for Energy-aware Trust Establishment in Dynamic Networks of Cyber Physical Devices

In a dynamic network, cyber physical devices collect and share data by opportunistically connecting with each other. By their very nature, computations in dynamic networks may be distributed among several untrusted devices, some of which may be malicious in intent. It is therefore key to have mechanisms that allow one device to establish the trustworthiness of another device in the dynamic network. It is possible to address this problem using trusted computing protocols proposed in the research literature. However, in this paper we make the case that existing trusted computing protocols are not directly applicable to dynamic networks. This is because cyber physical devices in a dynamic network are often resourceconstrained, and trusted computing protocols involve challenges/responses between multiple communicating parties, which may lead to a significant strain on these devices’ limited resources. We therefore conclude with a call for research on energy-aware trust establishment for dynamic networks.