Trust evaluation model for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks offer many kinds of beneficial solutions in various fields such as ocean and wildlife monitoring, people``s heart rates monitoring in medical application, environmental disasters monitoring, and many other military applications. A major feature of wireless sensor networks is infrastructure-less, so each sensor node of the network assists each other and controls packets from one node to another. Above all, because wireless sensor networks are often deployed in open environment and interact closely with their physical environments and people, the sensor networks are likely to be susceptible to their unexpected physical environments and intentional attacks from some adversaries. In addition, sensor devices are limited in their resources and vulnerable to a node capture attack, so even a few malicious adversaries can easily compromise sensor devices, extract cryptographic secrets from them, or inject forged data into the networks to make the networks be in confusion. Because of these unique challenges of wireless sensor networks, traditional security techniques used in conventional networks cannot be applied directly to wireless sensor networks. Several conventional cryptographic approaches such as key management and authentication schemes can support wireless sensor networks to purge false data injected from malicious outsiders. However, such conventional cryptographic approaches cannot prevent the injection of false data from compromised insider nodes which have already been authenticated as legal ones in the networks. Once authenticated as a legitimate node, broadcasting data from that node cannot help being accepted as trustful data in the networks without any question. Therefore, a novel trust management scheme is necessary to distinguish illegal nodes from legal ones, and filter out malicious nodes`` deceitful data in the wireless sensor networks. In this paper, to make resilient wireless sensor networks, we propose a trust evaluation...