Security and trust management in self-organizing network (SON): A new model of communications.

摘要

Today, service providers enable communications and control the related infrastructure. They are recognized as authorities, who are trusted by the subscribers. We envision a novel way of communications in the future - individual users will be able to establish a Self-Organizing Network (SON), where users take more control of communications. A SON must be secure and trusted by users for reliability. This research addresses the security and trust issues about SON. The proposed solutions rely on Public-Key Cryptography (PKC) and social network concepts.A pure SON does not rely on hierarchical structure for security management. In a SON, a person will encounter many strangers. The discovery of the small-world phenomenon suggests that we can utilize a web of trust for security. In this research, we investigate the solutions that make SONs secure and reliable, and answer three basic questions. (1) How does web of trust work in SONs? (2) What role can an authority play for SONs? (3) Should we trust strangers?For the first question, we predict that SONs will exhibit small-world characteristics. The results from sociology experiments show that people are connected through six degrees of separation. This property makes SONs feasible. However, it does not necessarily mean people trust each other. The paradox is explained and the solution is provided in the dissertation.For the second question, we discuss a hybrid trust structure that leverages the involvement of an authority to increase trust levels between users to improve the reliability of SONs. The rise of SONs does not mean that the service providers will disappear. Each of them has advantages and disadvantages from networking and security perspectives. A hybrid structure will benefit both of them.For the third question, we expect there will be worst-case scenarios - isolated people exist in the trust network. We propose two methods (macro method and micro method) for making a trust decision.SON is a new communication model. Through the studies we provide the architecture as well as the solutions for solving specific issues. We also discuss the future works that are needed for its success.