Management and applications of trust in Wireless Sensor Networks: A survey

TLDR

Wireless sensor networks are vulnerable to numerous security threats, and their communication, computation, and delay constraints render traditional security mechanisms ineffective, prompting the development of trust management models that have attracted extensive research. This paper surveys trust models tailored for wireless sensor networks. The survey analyzes trust model applications—including malicious attack detection, secure routing, data aggregation, localization, and node selection—and evaluates their resilience against various malicious attacks. The authors conclude with best‑practice guidelines essential for building robust trust models in WSNs.

Abstract

Wireless Sensors Networks (WSNs) are susceptible to many security threats, and because of communication, computation and delay constraints of WSNs, traditional security mechanisms cannot be used. Trust management models have been recently suggested as an effective security mechanism for WSNs. Considerable research has been done on modeling and managing trust. In this paper, we present a detailed survey on various trust models that are geared towards WSNs. Then, we analyze various applications of trust models. They are malicious attack detection, secure routing, secure data aggregation, secure localization and secure node selection. In addition, we categorize various types of malicious attacks against trust models and analyze whether the existing trust models can resist these attacks or not. Finally, based on all the analysis and comparisons, we list several trust best practices that are essential for developing a robust trust model for WSNs.