Reputation-based Trust in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are becoming more and more common. WSNs have many existing and envisioned applications due to their ease of deployment, particularly in remote areas. But the security of WSNs is still an issue. Some existing approaches mainly rely on cryptography to ensure data authentication and integrity. These approaches only address part of the problem of security in WSNs. However, these approaches are not sufficient for the unique characteristics and novel misbehaviors encountered in WSNs. Recently, the use of reputation systems has become an important mechanism in WSNs. In this paper we propose a reputation-based trust which borrows tools from probability, statistics and mathematics analysis. We have suggested a new term certainty used in trust system and we argued that the positive or negative outcomes for a certain event is not enough information to make a decision in WSNs. We build up a reputation space and trust space in WSNs, and define a transformation from reputation space to trust space. Finally, we discuss some important properties of them and point out some open problems in reputation system in WSNs.