Developing a model for trust management in pervasive devices

Pervasive devices interacting in open and dynamic spaces with each others require a mechanism that allows them acting autonomously in a secure way and protecting their resources. Trust is fundamental to establish communication with other users, because the identity is often uncertain and on one´s own does not provide trust information, for instance, could an unknown user be trustworthy? Nowadays, these devices have a so limited security support. So, we propose a simple trust management model to enhance such support, allowing them interact in ad hoc networks and peer-to-peer applications in a secure way. In this paper, our main contribution is a mathematical and a probabilistic model, as well as demonstrating the model feasibility, since it has been assessed through the prototype implementation, which has been tested in a Pocket PC