Towards Efficient Blockchain-Based Cross-Domain Trust Reputation Management for LS-HetNet

The large-scale heterogeneous network (LS-HetNet) provides seamless interconnection of everything by integrating different networks into a unified one, but it also comes with a significant risk of insider attacks that are difficult to address through traditional border-based security measures. Trust and reputation management (TRM) is a practical approach to solving this problem. However, past schemes are struggled to cope with the cross-domain architecture, scalability, and context dependency required by LS-HetNet, and have faced potential trust attacks. Hence, this paper proposes an efficient and robust cross-domain trust reputation model, MBC-Trust, to meet the above requirements simultaneously. MBC-Trust adopts a multi-level blockchain framework and a cloud-fog computing paradigm to support frequent and concurrent cross-domain trust sharing. Numerous network entities can access trust in an efficient and scalable manner through the collaboration of local and monitoring chains. In addition, a well-designed time decay function, recommendation trust factors, and other measures enhance the robustness of the model to attacks during trust evaluation and provide sensitive context awareness. Experiments demonstrate that MBC-Trust is highly efficient, robust, and scalable.