On the Importance of Trust in Next-Generation Networked Cyber-Physical Systems

With 5G and beyond promises to realize massive machine-type communications, a wide range of applications have driven interest in complex heterogeneous networked systems, including multi-agent optimization, large-scale distributed learning, 5G service provisioning, etc. This trend highlights the essence of seamless control, management, and security mechanisms to be in place for the next-generation networked cyber-physical systems (CPS). In this paper, we interpret trust as a relation among networked collaborating entities that can set forth a measure for evaluating the status of network components and secure the execution of the collaborative protocol. In this paper, we will first elaborate on the importance of trust as a metric and then present a mathematical framework for trust computation and aggregation within a network. We consider two use-case examples where trust can be incorporated into the next-generation networked CPS and improve the security of decision-making, i.e. i) federated learning (FL), and ii) network resource provisioning. Finally, we explain the challenges associated with aggregating the trust evidence and briefly explain our ideas to tackle them.