A Trust Management System for Securing Data Plane of Ad-Hoc Networks

Abstract

The rapidly developing ad-hoc network technology has a wide range of applications, such as vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs), wireless sensor networks (WSNs), and emergency and military communications. Due to the characteristics such as openness and dynamic topology, ad-hoc networks suffer from various attacks in the data plane. Even worse, some attacks can subvert or bypass the frequently used identity-based security mechanisms. To secure the data plane of ad-hoc networks, we propose a novel trust management system. In the system, fuzzy logic is employed to formulate imprecise empirical knowledge, which is used to evaluate the path trust value. Together with fuzzy logic, graph theory is adopted to build a novel trust model for calculating the node trust value. To defend against increasing attacks to trust management systems, such as slandering and harboring, we propose a filtering algorithm. An efficient trustworthiness decay method is also designed to resolve the conflict about the decaying historical trust value in a trust-based routing decision. Additionally, we present a feasible trust factor collection approach to assure that the trust management system is compatible with other security primitives, such as encryption and encapsulation. Finally, we implement the proposed trust management system by integrating it into the optimized link state routing (OLSR) protocol. Simulation results show that the proposed trust management system works well in detecting and resisting data-plane attacks.