Section: Research Program

Trust Management

While the distributed computing community relies on the trustworthiness of its algorithms to ensure systems availability, the security community historically makes the hypothesis of a Trusted Computing Base (TCB) that contains the security mechanisms (such as access controls, and cryptography) implementing the security policy. Unfortunately, as information systems get increasingly complex and open, the TCB management may itself get very complex, dynamic and error-prone. From our point of view, an appealing approach is to distribute and manage the TCB on each node and to leverage the trustworthiness of the distributed algorithms to strengthen each node's TCB. Accordingly, the CIDRE group studies automated trust management systems at all the three identified levels:

• At the node level, such a system should allow each node to evaluate by itself the trustworthiness of its neighborhood and to self-configure the security mechanisms it implements;

• At the group level, such a system might rely on existing trust relations with other nodes of the group to enhance the significance and the reliability of the gathered information;

• At the open network level, such a system should rely on reputation mechanisms to estimate the trustworthiness of the peers the node interacts with. The system might also benefit from the information provided by a priori trusted peers that, for instance, would belong to the same group (see previous item).

For the last two items, the automated trust management system will de facto follow the distributed computing approach. As such, emphasis will be put on the trustworthiness of the designed distributed algorithms. Thus, the proposed approach will provide both the adequate security mechanisms and a trustworthy distributed way of managing them. Regarding trust management, we still have research goals that are to be tackled. We briefly list hereafter some of our short and long term objectives at node, group and open networks levels:

1. At node level, we investigate how implicit trust relationships identified and deduced by a node during its interactions with its neighborhood could be explicitly used by the node (for instance by means of a series of rules) to locally evaluate the trustworthiness of its neighborhood. The impact of trust on the local security policy, and on its enforcement will be studied accordingly.

2. At the set of nodes level, we take advantage of the pre-existing trust relationship among the set of nodes to design composition mechanisms that would guarantee that automatically configured security policies are consistent with each group member security policy.

3. At the open distributed system level, we design reputation mechanisms to both defend the system against specific attacks (whitewashing, bad mouthing, ballot stuffing, isolation) by relying on the properties guaranteed at nodes and set of nodes levels, and guaranteeing persistent and safe feedback, and for specific cases in guaranteeing the right to be forgotten (i.e., the right to data erasure).