A Novel Trust Establishment Method for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Establishment of trust is important in wireless sensor networks for security enhancement and successful collaboration. Basically, a node establishes trust with other nodes by estimating a trust value based on monitored behavior of the other nodes. Since a malicious/misbehaving node might launch different attack strategies and might demonstrate random misbehavior, a trust estimation method should be robust against such attacks and misbehavior. Otherwise, the operation of trust establishment will be meaningless, and performance of an application that runs on top of trust establishment will degrade. In this paper, we propose a robust and novel trust estimation method. Unlike traditional trust estimation methods, we consider not only the weight of misbehavior but also the frequency of misbehavior. The frequency-of-misbehavior component explicitly demonstrates how frequently a node misbehaves during a certain observed time period, and it tracks the behavior of nodes more efficiently, which is a main factor in deriving an accurate trust value. In addition, the weight of misbehavior is comprehensively measured to mitigate the effect of an on-off attack. Frequency and weight of misbehavior are comprehensively combined to obtain the trust value. Evaluation results show that the proposed method outperforms other trust estimation methods under different attacks and types of misbehavior.