Trust Credential Distribution in Autonomic Networks

Autonomic networks are networks that are self-organized, and controlled and managed in a decentralized way. Peers/nodes in such networks rely on co-operation of each other. Thus, accurate trust establishment and maintenance is essential for secure and reliable operations in autonomic networks. Trust management in autonomic networks is a much more challenging problem than in traditional server-based networks. In traditional networks, centralized trusted servers provide necessary trust credentials for trust establishment. However, such servers are not available in autonomic networks, where trust credentials are distributed among users in the network. In this paper, we design a distributed scheme for efficiently distributing trust credentials, which requires no global information exchanges. Our scheme is inspired from network coding, where trust credentials are combined by the intermediate nodes during distribution.