Energy Efficient Trust-Based Security Mechanism for Wireless Sensors and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Nowadays, security is one of the most debated topics due to the diversity and increased number of attacks. Researchers and industry try to come with solutions to be one step in front of attackers but they do not always succeed. Sensors are the preferred devices for attackers because of their limited capabilities. Traditional security mechanisms do not work on these and therefore, dedicated solutions need to be created. For this reason, this paper proposes a solution for mitigating internal attacks that affect wireless sensors. With the aid of a trust-based security mechanism, compromised sensors can be detected and excluded before they can make more damage in the environment. The novelty of the proposition comes from the fact that is developed for environments that uses unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) to collect data. Current literature did not tackle with trust management in UAV-sensor communication and for this reason this paper can represent the first brick on a subject of great interest. The proposition uses both direct and indirect trust values for determining the final trust value. Results demonstrate that the proposition is energy efficient and can limit the damage produced by an attack.