Context-Aware Trust and Reputation Model for Fog-Based IoT

Abstract

Trust and reputation are important terms whether the communication is Humans-to-Human (H2H), Human-Machine-Interaction (HMI) or Machine-to-Machine (M2M). As Cloud computing and the internet of things (IoT) bring new innovations, they also cause various security and privacy issues. As numerous devices are continuously integrating as a core part of IoT, it is necessarily important to consider various security issues such as the trustworthiness of a user or detection of a malicious user. Moreover, fog computing also known as edge computing is revolutionizing the Cloud-based IoT by providing the Cloud services at the edge of the network, which can provide aid in overcoming security, privacy and trust issues. In this work, we propose a context-aware trust evaluation model to evaluate the trustworthiness of a user in a Fog based IoT (FIoT). The proposed approach uses a context-aware multi-source trust and reputation based evaluation system which helps in evaluating the trustworthiness of a user effectively. Further, we use context-aware feedback and feedback crawler system which helps in making trust evaluation unbiased, effective and reliable. Furthermore, we introduce monitor mode for malicious/untrustworthy users, which helps in monitoring the behavior and trustworthiness of a user. The proposed approach uses several tunable factors, which can be tuned based on the system's requirements. The simulations and results indicate that our approach is effective and reliable to evaluate the trustworthiness of a user.