Rendezvous based trust propagation to enhance distributed network security

Development of network of nodes connected with their trust values and the propagation of these trust values to far away nodes are basic operations of the modern day trustworthy networks. Trust can be exploited to mitigate the security threats in wireless network. Most of the existing trust propagation methods are based on flooding trust information, which puts a heavy burden on wireless communication, especially in ad hoc network and sensor network. In this paper, we propose a rendezvous based trust propagation scheme. Trust requester and trust provider send out trust-request and computed-trust tickets respectively, which will meet in some common rendezvous node with certain probability. Computed-trust will then be propagated to the requester. We carry out detailed performance evaluations of our scheme. The results show that our method achieves up to 66% overhead reduction in trust propagation compared to flood based methods.