Trusted Group Coordination for Pervasive Computing Systems (TUCANS)

Over the past few years, demand for hand-held computers and smartphones has been rising significantly. The unprecedented widespread adoptionof mobile computing devices, coupled with substantial advances in wireless networking technologies, have created the infrastructure needed to support the anywhere-anytime computing paradigm. In a society that has already become used to, and dependent on, the rapid access to information sourcesand services, mostly as a consequence of experience with the fixed Internet, the provision of ubiquitous computing services will appear extremely attractive.Consumer demand is set to raise, and so is the number and range of services on offer. Quite inevitably, the expected commercial return will attract malicious subjects as well, that will exploit the very nature of pervasive computing (e.g., the relative ease with which services and information can be accessed, the anonymity of the entities we interact with, the speed with which new entities come into reach while others disappear, etc.) to perpetrate attacks and make unjust financial gains. Being able to decide who canbe trusted in this plethora of opportunistically connected devices and services will thus become key to the success of ubiquitous computing. In designing a trust management model for pervasive systems, we recognise two major requirements that demand investigation: the need for models that mimic human trust reasoning as faithfully as possible, and the need for the formal elicitation of metrics that can be used to assess and compare the qualityof trust models. We intend to propose new models to tackle the problem of distributed trust management in pervasive systems, by means of a combination of group dynamics, microeconomic theory, belief theory,and social network theory. We will implement the models and assess their quality with respect to the newly defined metrics, by means of simulation andcase studies.