Security via Trusted Communications

Providing a trustworthy mobile computing platform is crucial for mobile communications, services and applications. This chapter studies methodologies and mechanisms of providing a trustworthy computing platform for mobile devices. In addition, we seek solutions to support trusted communications and collaboration among those platforms in a distributed and dynamic system. The first part of this chapter gives a brief overview of literature background. It includes detailed state-of-the-art in conceptualizing trust, trust modeling, trust evaluation and trust management and identifies emerging trends in this area. The second part of this chapter specifies a mechanism for trust sustainability among the platforms based on a trusted computing technology. It plays as the first level of autonomic trust management in our solution. The third part describes an adaptive trust control model. The trust management mechanism based on this model plays as the second level of our autonomic trust management solution. We demonstrate how the above two mechanisms can cooperate together to provide a comprehensive solution in the forth part. The fifth part further discusses other related issues, such as standardization and implementation strategies. Finally, conclusions and future work are presented in the last part.