Graph Algebraic Interpretation of Trust Establishment in Autonomic Networks

Trust in networks is the essential foundation for follow-on security mechanisms, such as key management and secure transmission. In this paper, we concentrate on trust establishment in self-organized, distributed and resourceconstraint networks. Such networks pose formidable challenges on trust establishment due to lack of infrastructure and centralized servers. We model our trust establishment strategy as a local voting scheme and discuss its long run behavior. More specifically, we investigate the dynamic evolution of trust within the network, i.e. how trust spreads among nodes, via analyzing its convergence behavior based on algebraic graph and Markov chain theories. As an important security concept, we also study the attack-resistant properties of our trust evaluation scheme in the presence of adversaries.