On-Off Attacks Mitigation against Trust Systems in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Trust and reputation systems have been regarded as a powerful tool to defend against insider attacks caused by the captured nodes in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). However, trust systems are vulnerable to on-off attacks, in which malicious nodes can opportunistically behave good or bad, compromising the network with the hope that bad behavior will be undetected. Thus, malicious nodes can remain trusted while behaving badly. In this paper, we propose O2Trust, On-Off attack mitigation for Trust systems in wireless sensor networks. O2Trust adopts the penalty policy against the misbehavior history of each node in the network as a reliable factor that should influence on the calculation of the trust value. This punishment future helps to perceive malicious node that aim to launch intelligent attacks against trust-establishment and consequently on-off attack is mitigated efficiently.