On Trust Establishment in Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

We present some properties of trust establishment in mobile, ad-hoc networks and illustrate how they differ from those of trust establishment in the Internet. We motivate these differences by providing an example of ad-hoc network use in battlefield scenarios, yet equally practical examples can be found in non-military environments. We argue that peer-to-peer networks are especially suitable to solve the problems of generation, distribution, and discovery of trust evidence in mobile ad-hoc networks, and illustrate the importance of evaluation metrics in trust establishment.