On Data-Centric Trust Establishment in Ephemeral Ad Hoc Networks

The authors argue that the traditional notion of trust as a relation among entities, while useful, becomes insufficient for emerging data-centric mobile ad hoc networks. In these systems, setting the data trust level equal to the trust level of the data-providing entity would ignore system salient features, rendering applications ineffective and systems inflexible. This would be even more so if their operation is ephemeral, i.e., characterized by short-lived associations in volatile environments. In this paper, they address this challenge by extending the traditional notion of trust to data-centric trust: trustworthiness attributed to node-reported data per se.