LTMS: A Lightweight Trust Management System for Wireless Medical Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless Medical Sensor Networks (WMSNs) offer ubiquitous health applications that enhance patients' quality of life and support national health systems. Detecting internal attacks on WMSNs is still challenging since cryptographic measures can not protect from compromised or selfish sensor nodes. Establishing a trust relationship between sensor nodes is recognized as a promising measure to reinforce the overall security of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). However, the existing trust schemes for WSNs are not necessarily fit for WMSNs due to their different operation, topology, resources limitations, and critical applications. In this paper, the aforementioned factors are regarded, and accordingly, two different methods to evaluate the trust value have been proposed to fit in-body, on-body, and off-body sensor nodes. Our Lightweight Trust Management System (LTMS) provides a further line of defense to detect packet drop attacks launched by compromised or selfish sensor nodes. Moreover, simulation results show that LTMS is more robust against complicated on-off attacks and can significantly reduce the processing overhead.Index Terms-Wireless Medical Sensor Networks (WMSNs), TMS, internal attacks, on-off attacks.

RRP: A Reliable Reinforcement Learning Based Routing Protocol for Wireless Medical Sensor Networks

“…1: Network Model resource limitations that impose further constraints in adopting security countermeasures. For example, the lithium iodide cell battery of the pacemaker is meant to last for seven years before it gets replaced via surgery [14]. Therefore, lightweight countermeasures and protocols are essential to extend the battery life and avoid unnecessary surgery complications.…”

“…Several TM schemes have been evaluated to choose the best candidate. LTMS [14] has been adopted for mainly two reasons. First, it has been developed to fit WMSN requirements.…”

TrustMod: A Trust Management Module For NS-3 Simulator

“…6 In this section, we validate the results obtained by the TrustMod module. The proposed trust scheme LTMS [18] is adopted for the validation process. LTMS is a lightweight trust management system for Wireless Medical Sensor Networks (WMSNs).…”

“…The first method LTMS(1), is a lightweight method used for inbody sensor nodes (SNs) as those SNs suffer from a stringent resource limitation, while LTMS(2) provides a further level of protection from on-off attacks and is designed for on-and off-body sensor nodes. Both LTMS(1) and LTMS(2) method are combined in algorithm 1, where α and β are the beta probability distribution levels, b t and d t are the slopes at the time unit t, Rep ij (t) is the reputation value maintained by the trustor i for the trustee j, thr1 is the defined threshold to differentiate between trustworthy and untrustworthy agents, which is usually set to 0.5 in the literature [17]- [20], thr2 represents the minimum trustworthiness for agents in normal operation and is set to 0.85 [18], ShRep ij (t) represents the short-term reputation value at the time unit t, and cycle and malicious are two parameters used to detect on-off attacks.…”

“…The indirect trust evaluation has been manually stopped before the simulations in order to neutralize the recommendation exchange messages on the results. The trust scheme robustness against on-off attacks is evaluated using the on-off Attack Detection Metric proposed in [18]. The validation process is carried out for the following scenarios.…”