Trust Management in Swarm-Based Autonomic Computing Systems

Trust management techniques must be adapted to the unique needs of the system architectures and problem domains to which they are applied. Certain characteristics of swarms, such as their lightweight, ephemeral nature and indirect communication, make this adaptation especially challenging. In this paper we look at the trust issues and opportunities in swarm-based autonomic computing systems and find that by monitoring the trustworthiness of the autonomic managers rather than the swarming sensors, the trust management problem becomes much more scalable and still serves to protect the swarm. We also analyze the applicability of trust management research as it has been applied to architectures with similar characteristics. Finally, we specify required characteristics for trust management mechanisms to be used to monitor the trustworthiness of the entities in a swarm-based autonomic computing system.