A trust evaluation framework in distributed networks: Vulnerability analysis and defense against attacks

Abstract

Abstract-The performance of distributed networks depends on collaboration among distributed entities. To enhance security in distributed networks, such as ad hoc networks, it is important to evaluate the trustworthiness of participating entities since trust is the major driving force for collaboration. In this paper, we present a framework to quantitatively measure trust, model trust propagation, and defend trust evaluation systems against malicious attacks. In particular, we address the fundamental understanding of trust, quantitative trust metrics, mathematical properties of trust, dynamic properties of trust, and trust models. The attacks against trust evaluation are identified and defense techniques are developed. The proposed trust evaluation system is employed in ad hoc networks for securing ad hoc routing and assisting malicious node detection. The implementation is fully distributed. Simulations show that the proposed system can significantly improve network throughput as well as effectively detect malicious behaviors in ad hoc networks. Further, extensive simulations are performed to illustrate various attacks and the effectiveness of the proposed defense techniques.

Trust Management and Admission Control for Host-Based Collaborative Intrusion Detection

“…Different reputation models are proposed in distributed systems [20][21][22][23]. These reputation models allow peers to ask advice about other peers' trustworthiness when evaluating the trustworthiness of these other peers.…”

“…Jiang and Baras [21] uses a global reputation management to evaluate distributed trust by aggregating votes from all peers in the network. Sun et al [22] propose for communication in distributed networks an entropy-based model and a probability-based model, which are used to calculate indirect trust, propagation trust and multi-path trust. These models involve a lot of overhead.…”

Cryptographic protocols to fight sinkhole attacks on tree-based routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

“…Trust-based systems [21], [22] are interesting approaches to deal with selective forwarding attacks. In these systems, interactions between sensors are used for trust level computation.…”

Trust Estimation in autonomic networks: a message passing approach

“…In fact since the overall performance of an autonomic network depends on the collaborations that take place among self-managing entities, it is fundamental to develop suitable models for establishing and maintaining trust relationships between them. As proposed in Sun et al (2006), in this context we will broadly interpret trust as a belief relationship, where an entity is confident that another one will operate fairly, or as it is designed.…”

“…As it is pointed out in Sun et al (2006) and in Langheinrich (2003), most of the work on trust management in the literature is essentially based on heuristics and on simulation as evaluation method. The validation of the proposed systems is often an overlooked aspect, where not all solutions are actually verified and almost none are implemented and tested in a real environment.…”