Policy Based Framework for Trust Management and Evolution of Peer to Peer Groups

Peer to peer collaborative groups are becoming increasingly popular for collaborative applications like video/audio conferencing, IP telephony, file sharing, collaborative work spaces, and multi-user games. The decentralized nature of these groups gives rise to the need of a secure group layer which integrates authentication, admission control, authorization, access control and key management. With the evolution of dynamic, self organizing groups like wikipedia, f/oss and other business community groups, it motivates the need for dynamic multi-level access control. In an open decentralized system attacks from malicious peers pose a significant threat to the integrity of the system. Reputation based trust management systems are able to provide some countermeasures. We integrate role based, policy based and trust based access control for decentralized groups and propose a dynamic multi-level policy mechanism with a context based trust metric for our previously proposed Integrated Framework for Authentication and access control in peer to peer groups. We have successfully modelled our protocols in a peer to peer simulator Peersim. The performance of the group can be tested for different policies in the presence of malicious peers.