A Secure Trust Establishment Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

Security techniques like cryptography and authentication can fail to protect a network once a node is compromised. Hence, trust establishment continuously monitors and evaluates node behavior to detect malicious and compromised nodes. However, just like other security schemes, trust establishment is also vulnerable to attack. Moreover, malicious nodes might misbehave intelligently to trick trust establishment schemes. Unfortunately, attack-resistance and robustness issues with trust establishment schemes have not received much attention from the research community. Considering the vulnerability of trust establishment to different attacks and the unique features of sensor nodes in wireless sensor networks, we propose a lightweight and robust trust establishment scheme. The proposed trust scheme is lightweight thanks to a simple trust estimation method. The comprehensiveness and flexibility of the proposed trust estimation scheme make it robust against different types of attack and misbehavior. Performance evaluation under different types of misbehavior and on-off attacks shows that the detection rate of the proposed trust mechanism is higher and more stable compared to other trust mechanisms.