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.