An adaptive secure communication framework for mobile peer-to-peer environments using Bayesian games

Abstract

Peers in Mobile P2P (MP2P) networks exploit both the structured and unstructured styles to enable communication in a peer-to-peer fashion. Such networks involve the participation of two types of peers: benign peers and malicious peers. Complexities are witnessed in the determination of the identity of the peers because of the user mobility and the unrestricted switching (ON/OFF) of the mobile devices. MP2P networks require a scalable, distributed and light-weighted secure communication scheme. Nevertheless, existing communication approaches lack the capability to satisfy the requirements above. In this paper, we propose an Adaptive Trusted Request and Authorization model (ATRA) over MP2P networks, by exploiting the limited historical interaction information among the peers and a Bayesian game to ensure secure communication. The simulation results reveal that regardless of the peer’s ability to obtain the other such peer’s trust and risk data, the request peers always spontaneously connect the trusted resource peers and the resource peers always preferentially authorize the trusted request peers. Performance comparison of ATRA with state-of-the-art secure communication schemes over MP2P networks shows that ATRA can: (a) improve the success rate of node typing identification, (b) reduce time required for secure connections found, (c) provide efficient resource sharing, and (d) maintain the lower average cost.