Towards Cooperative Self-Protecting Mobile Devices using Trustful Relationships

Security remains a major topic in today's networks. Especially in the mobile area there are many security issues that have not yet been satisfactorily addressed, let alone been solved. Most of the security mechanisms and techniques used in wired networks tend to rely upon a fixed network topology. For example, firewalls and Intrusion Detection Systems are placed at central points of a network and configured with a model of the network's structure to control and analyse the data flows transfered for harmful content. If at all, adopting these measures for the mobile world is not easy due to its dynamically changing environments and the mobile device's resource constraints that do not allow demanding analyse tasks. In this paper, we present our work in progress of developing a system architecture for cooperative and self-protecting mobile devices. Our approach is based on the assumption that a mobile network can be protected by securing all participating devices or at least all honest participating devices. Thus, we no longer insist on a global view of the network but on several local views. To make these views as precise as possible and to avoid serious performance bottlenecks on a single device we propose a strategy for coupling trusted mobile devices together into a cooperating group.