SensorTrust: A resilient trust model for wireless sensing systems

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are prone to failures and malicious attacks. Traditional approaches from encryption and authentication are not sufficient to solve the problems. Trust management of WSNs is bringing new approaches. However, it is still a challenge to establish a trust environment for WSNs. To conquer that challenge, we propose a resilient trust model with a focus on data integrity, SensorTrust, for hierarchical WSNs. SensorTrust integrates past history and recent risk to accurately identify the current trust level. It employs a Gaussian model to rate data integrity in a fine-grained style and a flexible update protocol to adapt to varied context. With acceptable overhead, SensorTrust proves resilient against varied faults and attacks. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.