A Green Trust Management Scheme to Mitigate Trust-Distortion Attacks on MANETs

Abstract

Due to the lack of a centralized management, mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are prone to various types of attacks. Trust management systems has been proposed to allow such networks to identify misbehaving nodes, enforce their collaboration in network functions. However, the trust management can be challenged by unique characteristics of MANETs in terms of absence of centralized management, severe resource constraints, important network dynamics. Mainly, trust-distortion attacks may attempt to deceive nodes 'estimation on other nodes' trustworthiness by generating dishonest recommendations or fulfilling double-face conducts. Besides, the energy devoted to establish the trust system may be important, reducing the network lifetime, producing environmental pollution. In this paper, we propose a green trust management scheme, called GTMS, capable to handle different trust-distortion attacks in a multi-attack environment, with minimum energy consumption. To achieve this, GTMS reinforces the knowledge of nodes on their neighborhood to inhibit trust-distortion attacks. Moreover, it self-adapts the frequency of its local, remote knowledge monitoring according to the network context to minimize energy consumption. GTMS is characterized by its energy efficiency, high quality of knowledge, resistance to trust-distortion attacks, protocol independence, self-adaptation, low computational intensiveness. Simulation results prove that GTMS significantly outperforms the existing alternatives in the literature in presence of simultaneous, contradictory different trust-distortion attacks.