An agent-based method for trust graph calculation in resource constrained environments

Resumen

In future resource constrained systems such as Industry 4.0 and Cyber-Physical Systems, thousands of resource constrained embedded devices communicate in order to reach a common objective. Information, then, is processed and transformed several times since it is acquired at physical level until it is received by user applications. Moreover, usually, each component in an current engineered system has almost no information about the other deployed modules. In that way, any malicious component may severely affect systems through the modification of operation data, as high-level applications can check the validity of received information in a hard way. Therefore, future technological components should only communicate with other trustworthy modules. Typically, solutions to address this problem are based on heavy technologies (such as certificates) which do not fulfil the requirements of embedded devices making up future systems. Thus, in this paper, a light computational solution to calculate the graph representing the trustworthy routes through which an application may obtain information is provided. Systems are represented as directed graphs, and untrustworthy branches are identified based on probability offered by a biparametric stochastic process (which is estimated by means an agent-based solution, consisting of a static and a mobile agent). Untrustworthy paths are also pruned following a hierarchical and scalable process. The proposed solution is based on the execution of some elemental requests whose response is known. Using the NS3 simulator, virtualization technologies and TAP bridges, the proposed algorithm is validated in a simulation scenario representing a real deployment.