Ontological Engineering Approach towards Trust Oriented Security Framework for Adhoc Networks

Abstract

Conventionally, user authentication and access control mechanisms would be almost enough, to handle security for stand-alone computers and small networks. Ad hoc networks are illustrated by multi-hop wireless connectivity and recurrently changing network topology which have made them infrastructure less. Adding trust to the existing security infrastructures would improvise the security of these environments. Describing trust relations and their sub-components using ontologies, creates a methodology and mechanism in order to efficiently design and engineer trust networks. This is going to be used as a service for providing trust for ad hoc network at any level i.e. routing, authentication or access control. A trust oriented security framework for adhoc network using ontological engineering approach is proposed by modeling ad hoc network, the OLSR (Optimized Link State Routing) protocol and trust model as OWL (Ontology Web language) ontologies, which are integrated using Jena. In this model, a trustor can calculate its trust about trustee and use the calculated trust values to make decisions depending on the context of the application or interaction about granting or rejecting it. A number of experiments with a possible implementation of suggested framework are performed to make out the characteristics of the trust model and its effect on the ad hoc network operations.