Trust Evaluation for Light Weight Security in Sensor Enabled Internet of Things: Game Theory Oriented Approach

In sensor-enabled Internet of Things (IoT), nodes are deployed in an open and remote environment, therefore, are vulnerable to a variety of attacks. Recently, trust-based schemes have played a pivotal role in addressing nodes' misbehavior attacks in IoT. However, the existing trust-based schemes apply network wide dissemination of the control packets that consume excessive energy in the quest of trust evaluation, which ultimately weakens the network lifetime. In this context, this paper presents an energy efficient trust evaluation (EETE) scheme that makes use of hierarchical trust evaluation model to alleviate the malicious effects of illegitimate sensor nodes and restricts network wide dissemination of trust requests to reduce the energy consumption in clustered-sensor enabled IoT. The proposed EETE scheme incorporates three dilemma game models to reduce additional needless transmissions while balancing the trust throughout the network. Specially: 1) a cluster formation game that promotes the nodes to be cluster head (CH) or cluster member to avoid the extraneous cluster; 2) an optimal cluster formation dilemma game to affirm the minimum number of trust recommendations for maintaining the balance of the trust in a cluster; and 3) an activity-based trust dilemma game to compute the Nash equilibrium that represents the best strategy for a CH to launch its anomaly detection technique which helps in mitigation of malicious activity. Simulation results show that the proposed EETE scheme outperforms the current trust evaluation schemes in terms of detection rate, energy efficiency and trust evaluation time for clustered-sensor enabled IoT.