Game Theoretic Modeling and Evolution of Trust in Autonomous Multi-Hop Networks: Application to Network Security and Privacy

Future applications will require autonomous devices to be interconnected to form a network. Such networks will not have a central manager; each node will manage itself and will be free to decide participation in any network function. As with traditional networks, these networks need to be secured to authenticate the nodes, prevent misuse, detect anomalies and protect user privacy. Network security and privacy protection without a central manager will be challenging. Several security mechanisms and privacy protections will require the cooperation of several nodes to defend the network from malicious attacks. We particularly investigate when for each node it is cost-effective to freely participate in the security mechanism or protect its privacy depending if that node believes or trusts that all other nodes or at least a minimum number of other nodes will do the same. In this case, each node will be involved in a trust dilemma that we will model using the mathematical framework of game theory and evolutionary game theory. The well known stag hunt game will be our basic game model. This paper will clearly present the interconnection between cooperation, trust, privacy and security in a network.