Assigning Trust to Devices in the Context of Consumer IoT Applications

With the outstanding growth in the number of consumer Internet of Things (IoT) connected devices, especially boosted by smart home applications and wearables, there is a need to provide such devices with security. If any device in such consumer IoT systems gets compromised, a data leak may cause serious threats to privacy, material losses, and even put people's lives at risk. Therefore, in this article, we focus on challenges associated with the trust involving communication between IoT devices, which is a key security-related characteristic in consumer IoT applications. A mathematical trust metric, based on a two-level approach, is used to illustrate how the presented proposal can be useful in the objective assessment of confidence and, consequently, provide better security among IoT devices.