CCTB: Context correlation for trust bootstrapping in pervasive environment

Handheld devices in a pervasive computing environment are prone to security as well as privacy violations, while discovering, sharing and accessing services and contents. Trust models are devised to fight against such violations and breaches. Although initial trust assignment is an important issue in evolving overall trust, a little amount of work has been done in this field so far. In pervasive smart space, similar type of contexts exhibits significant correlations to each other. However, this fact is not taken into consideration while computing the initial trust values. In this paper, we describe a new mechanism to assign initial trust: CCTB (Context Correlation for Trust Bootstrapping), which takes advantage of the presence of correlations among different contexts in a context-ontology. We evaluate the effectiveness of CCTB by simulating in two different scenarios. We show that CCTB offers better initial trust values than the other models considered here. We also implement a prototype for performance measurement using .NET Compact Framework.