Trust Formalization in Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

Recent advances in networking technology have increased the potential for dynamic enterprise collaborations between an open set of entities on a global scale. Mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) have created problem in resource sharing as they are constructed via mobile nodes without any prior knowledge of the existing nodes which may not be trustworthy. Trust management appears to be a promising approach to formalize trustworthiness among these anonymous nodes. The outcome of the study is to formalize a trust mechanism for MANETs. The aim of this paper is threefold: to formalize and evaluate trust, to use trust as a basis to establish keys between nodes in MANETs, and to utilize trust as a metric for establishing secure distributed control in MANETs. We define metrics for nodes to establish and manage trust, and use this mutual trust to make decisions on establishing group and/or pair-wise keys in the network. We also review the routing protocols of ad-hoc networks with trust considerations and select Dynamic Source Routing (DSR), a protocol that can be used in distributed ad hoc network settings for path discovery.