TMS: a trust management system for access control in dynamic collaborative environments

As mobile computing platforms make dynamic collaborative environments more common, the need for access control becomes more imperative. Centralized access control determination fails to work in unstructured networks, 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 off-line management are largely wasted. This paper presents a decentralized access control system that implements sociological trust constructs in a quantitative system to evaluate potential associates for collaborative interaction. A distributed, node-centric approach to trust management processes behavior grades into a reputation that nodes use to determine trustworthiness their peers before establishing associations. The application of a reputation against a dynamic risk assessment gives a measure of expectation of a peer's behavior, based on past performance and current the network environment. These safeguards work together to make a safer dynamic collaborative environment