A Multi-Level Trust Management Scheme for the Internet of Things

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The significance of the Internet of Things (IoT) in current trends is continuously rising. It is an umbrella term that signifies a network of physical devices that are embedded with electronics, software, sensors and connectivity that enable greater functions and services through the exchange of data accomplished through interconnection. The applications of the IoT are varied and numerous; they range from relatively simple home automation scenarios to the much more complex scenarios of interconnected smart cities. IoT is expected to dominate the future with huge amounts of content oriented traffic that is a result of intensive interactions between the millions of devices that will be available by then. The rising popularity of IoT has been accompanied by a corresponding rise in the number of issues. One of the issues is a lack of an established mechanism that deals with the issue of trust management. This issue is well addressed in the field of wireless sensor networks; an analogous framework for trust management does not exist for IoT. The complexity of the networked devices (allied with the complexity of the network itself) in addition to the fact that the environment in which the devices exist is itself continuously changing makes the development of a trust management scheme difficult. We propose a trust management scheme that helps establish trust between devices taking into account the nature, complexity and category of the interconnected devices. The level of service available to a node that requests a service from a service provider is predicated upon the trust level between the provider and requester. We elaborate on this concept and describe the emergence of trust over time that is also sensitive to the changing environment to which the devices might be subjected.