A Trust-Distortion Resistant Trust Management Scheme on Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

Trust management is a promising approach to conduct nodes’ transactions and establish management interactions in mobile ad hoc networks, in which collaboration between nodes is critical to achieve system goals. Lack of centralized management, severe resource constraints (e.g. computing power, energy, bandwidth), and important network dynamics (e.g. topology changes, node mobility, node failure, propagation channel conditions) make the trust management a challenging task in such a network. Mainly, trust management frameworks are prone to attacks trying to deceive nodes’ estimation on other nodes’ trustworthiness, referred to as trust-distortion attacks. In order to inhibit such attacks, we propose a Trust-distortion Resistant Trust Management Scheme (TRTMS) which provides nodes with an accurate estimation on other nodes’ behavior and enables them to handle different trust-distortion attacks in a multi-attack environment. Simulation results prove that TRTMS significantly outperforms the existing alternatives in the literature in presence of simultaneous and contradictory different trust-distortion attacks.