Trust Management Enhancement for the Internet of Things: a Smart Contract Approach

The Internet of Things (IoT) has witnessed tremendous growth in recent years, connecting billions of devices and enabling the exchange of vast amounts of data. Trust management plays a crucial role in establishing reliable and secure interactions among IoT devices and entities. This paper proposes a Smart Contract for Trust Management (SCoTMan) model that employs social relationships and adaptive weight adjustment to achieve efficient trust management in the IoT, leveraging the benefits of blockchain technology. Blockchain facilitates trust management by providing a global perspective on trust values among devices and enhancing trust propagation and updates. The model has been implemented and tested on the Hyperledger Fabric platform, utilizing IoT sample devices. Various experiments have been conducted to evaluate and validate the efficiency of the model. The model demonstrates improved performance in terms of trust convergence, and global storage cost, which is defined in this paper.