Efficient trust management with Bayesian-Evidence theorem to secure public key infrastructure-based mobile ad hoc networks

Abstract

In mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), the reliability of nodes, quality of data and access control cannot be achieved successfully for various network functionalities through traditional cryptographic security, which makes MANET vulnerable to illegitimate node behaviour changes. These node misbehaviours, referred as soft security threats, need to be detected and prevented in order to protect against the accumulation of false measurements with selfish and malicious intentions. Trust has been employed as a powerful tool to handle the soft security threats and to provide security among uncertain and dynamic nodes effectively in MANET. Therefore, it is of great importance that efficient trust management mechanisms should be developed in a public key infrastructure (PKI), in order to verify the identities on the ad hoc networks for reliable and secure group communication. However, the independent nature of nodes and the computational complexities make the trust management a challenging one in MANET. In this paper, we present an efficient distributed trust computation and misbehaviour verification method with Bayesian and Evidence theorem, on hexagonally clustered MANET. Besides, a secured PKI system is designed in the paper by applying the proposed trust management scheme in terms of certificate revocation, which is an important functionality of PKI cryptosystem. The uncertainty impacts the node’s anticipation of neighbour’s behaviour and decisions during communication; we include uncertainty in the trust management system. An efficient method to reduce the uncertainty is to exploit the mobility characteristics of MANET that accelerates the trust convergence. The simulation results reveal a better performance against adversaries in creating considerable untrustworthy transactions with a mobility-aware cluster guarantee. Moreover, the proposed trust application shows its betterment in the revocation process in terms of revocation rate and time. Thus, the proposed scheme provides an effective security solution that incorporates the optimistic features of trust mechanisms and hierarchical Voronoi clustering.