Robust cooperative trust establishment for MANETs

Abstract

In a mobile ad hoc network (MANET), a source node must rely on intermediate nodes to forward its packets along multihop routes to the destination node. Due to the lack of infrastructure in such networks, secure and reliable packet delivery is difficult to achieve. We propose a robust cooperative trust establishment scheme to improve the reliability of packet delivery in MANETs, particularly in the presence of malicious nodes. In the proposed scheme, each node determines the trustworthiness of the other nodes with respect to reliable packet forwarding by combining first-hand trust information obtained independently of other nodes and second-hand trust information obtained via recommendations from other nodes. First-hand trust information for neighbor nodes is obtained via direct observations at the MAC layer whereas first-hand information for non-neighbor nodes is obtained via feedback from acknowledgements sent in response to data packets. The proposed scheme exploits information sharing among nodes to accelerate the convergence of trust establishment procedures, yet is robust against the propagation of false trust information by malicious nodes. We present simulation results which demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in a variety of scenarios involving nodes that are malicious both with respect to packet forwarding and trust propagation.

On Data-Centric Trust Establishment in Ephemeral Ad Hoc Networks

“…Hence, a decision logic should be able to output the final result as fast as possible, based on the freshly received reports. This property distinguishes the mechanisms explored in this work from other approaches that rely on a longer history of available reports (e.g., reputation systems [4], [18], [27]). In this section, we are only interested in the decision delay as reports arrive.…”

“…In the latter, most contributions assume that there is no infrastructure and no PKI; trust is a relation among entities; trust is based on observations, with a history of interactions needed to establish trust. To the best of our knowledge, the computation of trust values in the context of ad hoc networks has been considered in only two cases: certification [7], [25] and routing [4], [27]. Otherwise, trust evaluation assumes the prior establishment of trust relations.…”

“…Several papers [4], [8], [18], [27] describe the use of modified Bayesian approaches to build reputations systems with secondhand information to establish trust in routing protocols. As mentioned throughout the paper, reputation systems monitor node actions over several interactions to compute node trust values.…”

“…This was also the case when trust was derived via fairly lengthy interactions among nodes, as in reputation systems [4], [8], [18], [27]. Moreover, any new data trust relationships that needed to be established required only trust in the entity that produced those data.…”

Policy-Based Malicious Peer Detection in Ad Hoc Networks

“…k is modified whenever we obtain any novel information regarding its trustworthiness in terms of both direct observation results from the node itself and indirect observation results from other nodes. Direct observation results and indirect observation results are generally called first-hand information and second-hand information, respectively [23].…”