A security framework with trust management for sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks are prone to security attacks, which are either common to conventional networks or unique for themselves due to the resource-constraint, susceptibility to physical capture, and wireless nature. Security solutions using crypto schemes are not enough, and sometimes not efficient. In this paper, we develop a security framework with trust management, i.e. establishment of trustworthy network environment, to secure sensor networks. For trust management, we explore a distributed trust model, enabling recommendation-based trust and trust-based recommendation, to build reasonable trust relationship among network entities, represented by numerical values, i.e. trust values. And our security framework fully relies on the values to execute security-related actions aiming at the tradeoff between security and network performance.