Collaborative Trust: A Novel Paradigm of Trusted Mobile Computing

Abstract: With increasing complexity of modern-day mobile devices, security of these devices in presence of myriad attacks by an intelligent adversary is becoming a major issue. The vast majority of cell phones still remain unsecured from many existing and emerging security threats. To address the security threats in mobile devices we are exploring a technology, which we refer as "Collaborative Trust". It is a technology that uses a system of devices cooperating with each other (working in a fixed or ad-hoc network) to achieve the individual security of each device. The idea is that each device is insecure by itself, since in many cases it is incapable of checking its safety by itself (e.g. when it is compromised it may lose its ability to monitor its own trustworthiness), but together, they can ensure each other's security in a collaborative manner.