Toward a decentralized trust-based access control system for dynamic collaboration

As ad-hoc collaborative environments become more common, the need for access control becomes more imperative. Centralized access control determination fails to work in mobile ad-hoc networking environments, as the information necessary for pre-configuration is not available. This situation is exacerbated by the dynamic nature of the environment´s membership, so that the time and resources expended in offline management are largely wasted. This paper presents a decentralized access control system that implements sociological trust constructs in a quantitative system to evaluate interaction partners. A distributed, node-centric approach to reputation management processes nodal behavior feedback and provides a reputation index that nodes use to determine trustworthiness their peers before establishing associations. The availability of a reputation index gives a measure of expectation of a peer´s behavior, based on past performance, and makes a MANET a more distributed operational environment.