How the Role-Based Trust Management Can Be Applied to Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Trust plays an important role in human life environments. That is why the researchers has been focusing on it for a long time. It allows us to delegate tasks and decisions to an appropriate person. In social sciences trust between humans was studied, but it also was analyzed in economic transactions. A lot of computer scientists from different areas, like security, semantic web, electronic commerce, social networks tried to transfer this concept to their domains. Trust is an essential factor in any kind of network, whether social or computer. Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are characterized by severely constrained resources, they have limited power supplies, low transmission bandwidth, small memory sizes and limited energy, therefore security techniques used in traditional wired networks cannot be adopted directly. Some effort has been expended in this fields, but the concept of trust is defined in slightly different ways by different researchers. In this paper we will show how the family of Role-based Trust management languages (RT) can be used in WSN. RT is used for representing security policies and credentials in decentralized, distributed access control systems. A credential provides information about the privileges of users and the security policies issued by one or more trusted authorities.