Secure trust metadata management for mobile ad-hoc networks

A trust management framework is useful to ensure proper functioning of a mobile ad-hoc network (MANET). Trust metadata created by individual nodes, based on their observation of the behavior of other nodes in their vicinity, is required to be accessible to a trust authority (TA) (e.g., the network administrator) for prompt decision making (e.g., revoking malicious nodes). In this work, for security and scalability reasons, we propose a secure semantics-aware trust metadata management scheme to partition and store an information network of trust metadata of nodes in a MANET. That is, trust metadata is securely propagated to and stored at certain geographic locations inside the network itself, based on its semantics. The TA can send queries of various types in the network to obtain the trust metadata of its interest. This scheme is robust to several security attacks that attempt to disrupt the availability of trust metadata in the network. Our analysis shows that the proposed scheme provides desirable security and functionality properties with low query overhead.