Towards Trustworthy Information Sharing by Creating Cyber Security Alliances

As attacks are becoming more and more organized, collaboration amongst network domain owners is required next to arranging technical counter measures. Sharing cyber intelligence amongst network domain owners is, therefore, becoming increasingly important. Additionally, networks have grown scale, complexity, and degree of inter-connectedness, such that their protection can often only be guaranteed and financed as a shared effort. In this paper, we introduce the concept of cyber security alliance shaped by different organizations that facilitate the sharing of incident information across them. Creating a cyber security alliance highlights requirements such as: 1) creates and manages trust among the members, 2) introduces a federated governance model, creating common policies, standards for alliance's members, and 3) provides a strong incentive to partners to join an alliance by introducing a common benefit. This paper discusses ongoing research on a social trust model, which helps the members to select the right partner to perform joint tasks, and encourages sharing of incident information. Furthermore, we use the service provider group framework as a way to arrange the establishment of our proposed cyber security alliance that coordinates activities across the alliance to establish trust. We present our social computational trust model and its antecedents.