Generalized Trust Negotiation for Pervasive Computing

Pervasive computing environment is viewed as an incorporated space comprised of mobile users, system services, system resources, and sensors embedded in physical environment. Users can access resources and obtain services anytime, anywhere. Trust is crucial to secure interaction among previously unknown principals. Traditional trust solutions normally depend on centralized trust certification authorities, and they are inappropriate to pervasive computing environments. In this paper, generalized trust negotiation (GTN) to establish trust relationship between strangers is presented, in which credential is exchanged only once, and then two parties exchanges secret key iteratively until trust negotiation succeeds or fails. GTN can avoid the heavy computational demands arising from the public key cryptography operations and needs less memory space to save credentials than those in traditional trust negotiation. In addition, GTN can prevent the vulnerability of man-in-the-middle attacks which the traditional trust negotiation has.