Social Trust in Opportunistic Networks

• Published in: 2010 INFOCOM IEEE Conference on Computer Communications Workshops pp. 1 - 6
• Main Authors: Trifunovic, Sacha, Legendre, Franck, Anastasiades, Carlos
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.03.2010
• Subjects: Communication system security; Communications Society; Computer networks; Cryptography; Detection algorithms; Distributed computing; Laboratories; Peer to peer computing; Robustness; Social network services
• DOI: 10.1109/INFCOMW.2010.5466696

Opportunistic networks enable mobile users to participate in various social interactions with applications such as content distribution and micro-blogs. Because of their distributed nature, securing user interactions relies rather on trust than hard cryptography. Trust is often based on past user interactions such as in reputation systems relying on ratings. Yet, a more fundamental trust, social trust - assessing a user is genuine with honest intentions - must be established beforehand as many identities can be created easily (i.e., sybils). By leveraging the social network structure and its dynamics (conscious secure pairing and wireless contacts), we propose two complementary approaches for social trust establishment: explicit social trust and implicit social trust. Complexity, trust propagation and security issues are evaluated using real world complex graphs, synthetic mobility models and mobility traces. We show how our approach limits the maximum number of sybils independently of the network size and is more robust against manipulation attacks compared to state-of-the-art approaches such as PGP- like certification chains and distributed community detection algorithms.