A trust-based approach for securing data communication in delay tolerant networks

The proliferation of network technologies drives many different network architectures to provide huge variety of services and contents to end clients. This task becomes more difficult when we are in networks with intermittent connections, called delay tolerant networks (DTN) where security is an important issue. In this paper, we propose a trust-based approach to secure data transfer in DTN in the presence of malicious transporters. Our proposal is intended to a DTN architecture which includes several sub-networks geographically dispersed in isolated regions and having an intermittent access to an infrastructure-based network (like internet). Our approach is based on a particular web-of-trust, which is formed based on existing social relationship among clients and transporters. We conducted intensive simulations and the obtained results show that it offers high packet delivery rate and resists against malicious transporter's behaviour.