Securing Software-Defined WSNs Communication via Trust Management

Software-defined wireless sensor networks (SDWSNs) can be functionally affected by malicious sensor nodes that perform arbitrary actions, e.g., message dropping or flooding. The malicious nodes can degrade the availability of the network due to in-band communications and the inherent lack of secure channels in SDWSNs. In this article, we design a hierarchical trust management scheme for SDWSNs (namely, TSW) to detect potential threats inside SDWSNs while promoting node cooperation and supporting decision making in the forwarding process. TSW evaluates the trustworthiness of involved nodes and enables the detection of malicious behavior at various levels of the SDWSN architecture. We develop sensitive trust computational models to detect several malicious attacks. Furthermore, we propose separate trust scores and parameters for control and data traffic, respectively, to enhance the detection performance against attacks directed at the crucial traffic of the control plane. Furthermore, we develop an acknowledgment-based trust recording mechanism by exploiting some built-in SDN control messages. To ensure the resilience and honesty of the trust scores, a weighted averaging approach is adopted, and a reliability trust metric is defined. Through extensive analyses and numerical simulations, we demonstrate that TSW is efficient in detecting malicious nodes that launch several communications and trust management threats, such as black-hole, selective forwarding, denial of service, bad mouthing, and ON–OFF attacks.