A soft dynamic service specific trust management and authentication scheme for mobile adhoc networks

Authentication and trust management in an adhoc network is a challenging task. Cryptography and other hard approaches do not provide a quantitative measurement of trust. Also, trust assignment to a new node having no history of any previous transaction had not been concrete. Human society authenticates people dynamically. This paper proposes a new strategy involving two parameters alpha and beta, which authenticates a node in a mobile adhoc network drawing inspiration from the way authentication, is done in a human society. The alpha parameter gives the quantitative measurement of seeking trust, and the beta parameter gives the quantitative measurement of assigning trust. The dynamism of trust change in a cluster of nodes is also explained by introducing time credit point, service credit point and discredit point. The strategy proposes to use a downloadable active security component from the trust authentication authority, rather than any passive certificate or encryption based authentication. This paper also says how to choose next trust authority in case the primary authority fails