Trust-based security for wireless ad hoc and sensor networks

Wireless sensors networks are susceptible to a large number of security threats, and because of the communication, computation and delay constraints of most applications that run on top of these networks, traditional security mechanisms cannot be used. Trust and reputation have been recently suggested as an effective security mechanism for open environments such as the Internet, and considerable research has been done on modeling and managing trust and reputation. Using the trust and reputation management scheme to secure wireless sensor networks (WSNs) requires paying close attention to the incurred bandwidth and delay overhead, which have thus far been overlooked by most research work. In this paper, we propose a novel agent-based trust and reputation management scheme (ATRM) for wireless sensor networks. The objective of the scheme is to manage trust and reputation locally with minimal overhead in terms of extra messages and time delay. Throughout the entirety of this paper, we describe our scheme and prove its correctness. We will also present our extensive performance evaluation results, which clearly show that trust and reputation can be computed in wireless sensor networks with minimal overhead. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.