A novel multidimensional trust evaluation and fusion mechanism in fog-based Internet of Things

Abstract

With the fast advancement of IoT, it has gained more attention from industry and academia. However, because diverse security attacks result in the lack of trust between IoT edge devices and the network, a proper trust mechanism is necessary. To address the issue, a novel trust management approach is proposed in this work. In particular, we have proposed a multidimensional trust evaluation mechanism to comprehensively evaluate the trustworthiness of IoT edge devices, with diverse opinions formed by different network entities after observing. Next, a novel trust fusion scheme named JSDM-AHP that integrates the objective Jensen–Shannon divergence measure (JSDM) and analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is developed to fuse diverse decision factors. Theoretical analysis and simulation results show that the proposed trust strategy has high computation-efficiency, scalability, resilience, robustness, and outperforms all the other compered methods in reliability. Furthermore, with the proposed security approach, diverse cyber attacks such as flooding attacks, random attacks, conflicting behavior attacks, on–off attacks, and recommendation attacks can well be defended against, reflecting the high security of the method.