Trust management in Delay Tolerant Networks utilizing erasure coding

There is a need for robust networks in all environments including austere ones. The prime example is Delay Tolerant Networks (DTN) that are subject to a growing body of research. These networks support applications used by the military and first responders, especially in emergency situations. Securing a DTN is not a trivial undertaking due to node mobility and the ADHOC method in which nodes communicate. Here, we propose a distributed trust management scheme to secure this class of networks with many of the underlying principles applicable to the larger class of Mobile ADHOC Networks (MANET). The scheme employs erasure coding not only to increase delivery rate in a DTN but also to infer the trustworthiness of the nodes along all paths that deliver a message segments to the destination. The proposed approach enables us to decide when the destination node should stop waiting for additional segments and instead request message retransmission. Moreover, even after the message is recreated successfully, additional segments received enable the destination to collect precious trust information about the nodes involved in delivery of these segments. We show how distributing this trust information identifies compromised nodes.