Message from the International Workshop on Security and Trust in Decentralized/Distributed Data Structures (STD3S 2006) Organizers
Manfred Hauswirth, Andreas Wombacher, Program Co-Chairs · 2006
Decentralized/distributed data structures (D3S) have recently received a lot of attention with the successful introduction of peer-to-peer systems, Web services, Grids, and ubiquitous computing systems as specific examples of D3S. The persuasive arguments in favor of these systems are that they try to avoid centralization as a performance bottleneck, strive for decreasing infrastructure costs and increasing performance by using available distributed resources, and are relatively easy to deploy and maintain due to inherent self-organization properties. Distribution, decentralization, and self-organization are the basic underlying concepts facilitating these advantages. However, they also introduce new security problems and make trust a central issue as the behavior and functioning of the system heavily depend on the cooperation and resource contributions of the participants. In hostile environments and if no trust/reputation management system is in place, systems are doomed to fail. Existing, centralized approaches are not applicable and only limited knowledge of the global situation of the system is available to the participants which requires new approaches to address security and trust.