Brief announcement: distributed trust management and revocation

Fair node and network operation is a key to ensure the correct system operation. The problem arises when some nodes become compromised or faulty endangering the overall system. This is especially challenging in sensor networks because they are often deployed in hostile environments and have to endure both passive and active attacks. Therefore, a node should only communicate with trusted nodes, while non-trusted nodes should be removed from the system to prevent them from further disrupting its normal operation. To address such threats, we introduce the Efficient Cooperative Security (ECoSec) - a distributed and adaptive protocol that allows a network to control the admission and revocation of nodes in a cooperative and democratic way during two voting rounds. Whereas the contributions of the protocol to the family of cooperative security protocols are two fold. First, it introduces the use of polynomial-based votes showing that its operation, and in general, operation of cooperative security protocols, can endure up to 33% of misbehaving nodes. Second, the protocol applies correlated keying material structures to verify the node admission and node revocation voting procedures reducing the overall communication overhead.