Unified trust establishment by leveraging remote attestation -modeling and analysis

摘要

Purpose - Ambient service provisioning with the least human participation in a pervasive computing environment, which is composed of interconnected devices and sensors, raises several trust and security issues. Accurate measuring of the integrity of the nodes that are willing to interact in this intimate environment can boost the trust evolution process, particularly in the uncertainty state and initiation phase. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach - The paper presents a unified approach in calculating the trust value among the nodes by leveraging some trusted computing functionalities. The approach aggregates different trust metrics like context, recommendation, and history to compute the trust index of each party more accurately. The paper also describes several existing remote attestation techniques including the chosen attestation technique for the model. The paper simulated the behaviour of the model in different scenarios and evaluates its responsiveness when the trustworthiness among peer nodes can be attested. Findings - The results obtained from different simulated scenarios demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed model. It is shown that trust evaluation process in the proposed model is very granular and also can be fine-tuned according to the application and context. The model strength in solving the uncertain situations and assigning appropriate initial trust values is shown, as well. Finally, the paper describes the future research plan to evaluate the accuracy of the model. Originality/value - The novel idea of applying remote attestation in trust determination may open up new avenues of research in the study of trust management and trust models.