A trust based Information sharing model (TRUISM) in MANET in the presence of uncertainty

In the absence of centralized trusted authorities (CTA), security is one of the foremost concern in Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANET) as the network is open to attacks and unreliability in the presence of malicious nodes (devices). With increasing demand of interactions among nodes, trust based information sharing needs more stringent rules to ensure security in this pervasive computing scenario. In this paper, we present a novel multi-hop recommendation based trust management scheme (TRUISM). We adapt famous Dempster-Shafer theory that can efficiently combine recommendations from multiple devices in the presence of unreliable and malicious recommendations. A novel recommendation-routing protocol named ‘buffering on-the-fly’ has been introduced to reduce the number of recommendation traffic by storing trust values in intermediate nodes. TRUISM also provides a flexible behavioral model for trust computation where a node can prioritize recommendations based on its requirements. Evaluation result shows that our model not only performs well in the presence of contradictory recommendations but also ensures a faster and scalable trust based information sharing by reducing the overall packet flow in the system.