Design, analysis, and deployment of omnipresent Formal Trust Model (FTM) with trust bootstrapping for pervasive environments

The rapid decrease in the size of mobile devices, coupled with an increase in capability, has enabled a swift proliferation of small and very capable devices into our daily lives. With such a prevalence of pervasive computing, the interaction among portable devices needs to be continuous and invisible to device users. As these devices become better connected, collaboration among them will play a vital role in sharing resources in an ad-hoc manner. The sharing of resources works as a facilitator for pervasive devices. However, this ad hoc interaction among devices provides the potential for security breaches. Trust can fight against such security violations by restricting malicious nodes from participating in interactions. Therefore, we need a unified trust relationship model between entities, which captures both the needs of the traditional computing world and the world of pervasive computing where the continuum of trust is based on identity, physical context or a combination of both. Here, we present a context specific and reputation-based trust model along with a brief survey of trust models suitable for peer-to-peer and ad-hoc environments. This paper presents a multi-hop recommendation protocol and a flexible behavioral model to handle interactions. One other contribution of this paper is the integration of an initial trust model; this model categorizes services or contexts in different security levels based on their security needs, and these security needs are considered in trust bootstrapping. The other major contribution of this paper is a simple method of handling malicious recommendations. This paper also illustrates the implementation and evaluation of our proposed formal trust model.