Trust and trust management represent the very foundations of Computer and Network Security Protocols enabling all cyber activities. The recent spate of national and global high-impact cyber security compromises threats, vulnerabilities and exposures leads to fundamental questioning of trust as the key enabler of all cyber phenomena in the unfolding era of exponentially increasing distrust. It is, therefore, necessary to understand the current state of trust and trust management modeling and implementation in the most high security environments such as in defense and space. Such understanding can serve as a foundation for modeling, design and implementation of next-generation mobile wireless networks for other high security environments such as in banking and finance. This study attempts to understand how trust and trust management are being modeled for the next-generation wireless communication systems (NIST) such as autonomous self-discovering, self-organizing and self-adaptive mobile ad hoc networks. Within the context of Network-Centric Operations (NCO), the paper examines (i) the capabilities of next-generation wireless mobile ad hoc networks; (ii) how trust and trust management are modeled in such mobile ad hoc networks; and (iii) how trust and trust management are implemented in trust-based task assignment in tactical networks. US Army Research Laboratory (ARL) Computational and Information Sciences Directorate’s Network Science research program on wireless mobile ad hoc networks is the focus of the case study.

As a preface to understand the modeling and implementation of trust and trust management for next-generation wireless communications systems, it will help to examine the overall context in which these issues are examined. Given our focus on high security environments, the specific defense and space context is that of nextgeneration military tactical mobile wireless networks being designed by the US Army Research Laboratory’s (ARL) Computational and Information Sciences Directorate. ARL situates the specific focus within its research on Network Science defined by Swami and West (2013) as “the study of complex systems whose behavior and responses are determined by exchanges and interactions between subsystems across a possibly dynamic and usually poorly defined set of pathways.” The focus of the present study is on the fundamental components of a network which include its structure composed of nodes and links (also called pathways) and its dynamics. The two together specify the network’s properties, i.e., its functions and behaviors.

Wireless mobile ad hoc networks, Network security, Trust management protocols, Trust and Trust management modeling, Trust and trust management metrics