ISSN:
1432-0541
Keywords:
Very large distributed systems
;
Secure communication
;
Trust, Channel synthesis
Source:
Springer Online Journal Archives 1860-2000
Topics:
Computer Science
,
Mathematics
Notes:
Abstract In a very large distributed system, entities may trust and mistrust others with respect to communication security in arbitrarily complex ways. We formulate the problem of designing a secure communication protocol, given a network interconnection and a ternary relation which captures trust between the entities. We didentify several important ways of synthesizing secure channels, and study the algorithmic problem of designing a secure communication protocol connecting the entities, given the connectivity of the network and the trust relationship between the nodes. We show that whether secure communication is possible can be decided easily in polynomial time. If we also require that channel synthesis proceed along unambiguous paths (in which case the protocol is defined on a spanning tree of the network), we show that the design problem is NP-complete, and we give a linear-time algorithm for an interesting special case of the problem.
Type of Medium:
Electronic Resource
URL:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF01293268
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