Analysis of Trust-based Access Control Using Game Theory

Access control is an important security mechanism that is used to limit user access to information and resources and to prevent malicious users from making unauthorized access. Traditional access control models are well suited for centralized and relatively static environments in which information about subjects and objects are known in priori, but they can hardly meet the needs of open and dynamic network environments. Access control in open network environments must therefore adapt to dynamic addition and deletion of subjects and objects. In this paper, we use game theory to analyze trust-based access control to help compute trust values that involve several factors. By viewing access control as a game played between the requester and the provider entities, we can develop strategies that would motivate subjects to make honest access to objects continuously to get the most payoffs.