Page 24 - Trust in ICT 2017

1 Trust in ICT

Traditional routing mechanisms cannot deal with several kinds of attacks. To make the wireless network
securer, one natural idea is to include trust relationships between individual nodes, i.e., who trusts who and
how, into route / path selection decisions. Thus, by making use of a trust-based platform, the routing
protocols could avoid the malicious nodes which lead to link broken, low throughput, high delay.

5.1.1.2 Actors

Trust Platform: responsible for trust evaluation between nodes in wireless networks
Node as trustor: based on its knowledge (data with some simple analytical methods) with support from Trust
Platform to assess the trustworthiness between the trustor and the trustee.
Node as trustee: responsible for providing information to Trust Platform when required in order to prove
itself as being trustful.
5.1.1.3 Pre-condition

Trust Agent (a part of the Trust Platform) periodically collects related-trust data from nodes in the networks.

5.1.1.4 Triggers
When on-demand routing protocols occur (This type of protocol finds a route on demand by flooding the
network with Route Request packets)
Periodically maintain the trust-based routing metrics of the networks (for each physical links) in case of Table-
driven routing protocols.
5.1.2 Trust-based malicious node detection and prevention

5.1.2.1 Description

The major objective of providing security in wireless networks are to defend the network resources against
variety of attacks, such as Denial of Service (DoS) attack, wormhole attack, black-hole attack, routing table
overflow and poisoning attack, packet replication attack, gray-hole attack and modification of packets attack.
Nodes in wireless networks are placed in large numbers in hostile environment, which makes difficult to
protect against tampering or captured by an adversary force that can launch insider attacks to make a node
compromised and can have easy access to valid keys and memory contents. Then, an adversary can learn
contents of memory and have access to valid secret keys stored in the compromised nodes and use them to
launch insider attacks.

Protocols and algorithms based on traditional security mechanisms such as authentication, encryption and
cryptography are not completely suitable for Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET), Vehicular Ad Hoc Network
(VANET) and Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) as these mechanisms assumes that all participating nodes are
cooperative and trustworthy and also require extensive computation, communication and storage. In recent
years, the concept of trust and reputation has been applied to field of wireless communication networks to
monitor varying behaviour of nodes and counter insider attacks. Reputation and trust are two very useful
tools that are used to facilitate decision making in diverse fields. Trust based security is a new way of
providing security without using cryptography approaches. Trust in the field of wireless communication
networks may be defined as degree of reliability of other nodes performing actions.

Trust and reputation management systems can be used to assists wireless networks in decision making
process. Trust between the nodes in maintained by recording the transactions of a node with other nodes in
the network, either directly or indirectly. A trust value will be calculated from the record that aids sensor
nodes to deal with uncertainty about the future actions of other nodes.
Trust based approaches are very useful to deal with node misbehaviour. The problem to address uncertainty
in decision making is dealt with trust and reputation management systems by maintaining past behaviour of
nodes. If a node holds a good reputation it will be forwarded with packets and considered as trustworthy
node; otherwise, it will be considered untrustworthy. The words trust and reputation has been commonly
used in our personal and business dealings. The repute of a person in established from the actions performed
previously and it goes on increasing with the time if he or she remains consistently sincere in their dealings.

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