Research project area:Trustworthy Multiparty Interactions in Dynamic Networking Environments

Responsible: Bjarne E. Helvik

Abstract: The main goal of the project is to be able to quantitatively assess whether an interaction among two or more parties may be established and completed with a sufficient trustworthiness, i.e. QoS aspects which relates to reliability, availability, integrity and confidentiality. The measures are intended to be probabilistic to allow continuous risk estimation, i.e. the consequences of lack of trustworthiness may be taken into account. Secondary goals will be to propose, devise and demonstrate mechanisms that enable assessments and improve QoS in these aspects.

Interaction between multiple parties where substantial economic or immaterial values are at risk will become common, e.g. e-commerce, business interactions, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, emergency operations, personal matters. At the same time, the network environments become more open and dynamic, e.g. wireless access and ad hoc networks. The mechanisms available in the networks and at the user terminals to provide sufficient dependability and security may be highly variable. That may also be the case for some of the participating entities. The users will frequently be mobile and may move seamlessly in such a network environment without necessarily being aware of the properties of the current environment. Whether an interaction should take place or not should ideally be based on a consciously made trade-off between utility and risk.

Important problems are:

• Development of dependability models and analysis of middleware, e.g. group communication systems
• Assessment of performance aspects of multicast protocols to ensure reliable, atomic or causal broadcast
• Development of models for (multicast) communication in ad-hoc and hybrid access and transport networks
• Development of analysis mechanisms for sustainable interactions in highly unreliable environments
• Dependable multicast in ad-hoc environments
• New approaches to dependable multicast
• Security mechanisms in dynamic environments with non-trusted parties
• Probabilistic assessment of security services in dynamic environments with non-trusted parties
• Models for quantitatively negotiable security policies
• Models for trust relationships in dynamic environments