Trust Management and Context-Driven Access Control

The increasing diffusion of wireless portable devices and the emergence of mobile ad hoc networks promote anytime and anywhere opportunistic resource sharing. However, the fear of exposure to risky interactions is currently limiting the widespread uptake of ad hoc collaborations. This chapter introduces the challenge of identifying and validating novel security models/systems for securing ad hoc collaborations, by taking into account the high unpredictability, heterogeneity, and dynamicity of envisioned wireless environments. We claim that the concept of trust management should become a primary engineering design principle, to associate with the subsequent trust refinement into effective authorization policies, thus calling for original and innovative access control models. The chapter overviews the state-of-theart solutions for trust management and access control in wireless environments by pointing out both the need for their tight integration and the related emerging design guidelines, that is, exploitation of context awareness and adoption of semantic technologies.