A Distributed Trust Management Mechanism for the Internet of Things Using a Multi-Service Approach

In the Internet of Things (IoT) heterogeneous devices can cooperate and communicate to provide or require determined services. A multi-service IoT is vulnerable to many types of malicious attacks. A trust management scheme is a strategy to establish trust between devices. In this work we propose a distributed trust management model for IoT using direct and indirect observations. The trust of a node is computed by the service quality and recommendations from neighbors. The nodes locally compute the trust of their neighbors, without the need of a central entity. We implemented the proposed strategy in the Cooja simulator of the Contiki operating system to analyze the performance of the trust model. We performed simulations using different number of malicious nodes performing the bad mouthing attack. Simulation results show the trust management scheme is able to detect malicious nodes in the network.