Trust Management for Internet of Things: A Comprehensive Study

Driven by the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT) technology, the issue of trust has become increasingly apparent and received considerable scholarly attention in recent years. With the occurrence of various security incidents, data leakage accidents, and service fraud, which seriously affects the quality of service and system efficiency of IoT, trust is fast becoming a key issue in IoT system. In addition to the security and efficiency, trust further contains the reliability, attack resistance, fairness, flexibility, and incentive, resulting in a wide range of new researches from the trust management framework to the quantification method. In this work, various dimensions of trust, including definition, composition, aggregation, and computation are introduced and analyzed. We focus on comprehensive comparison of the state-of-the-art trust management researches and the related applications. Besides, we explore and discuss the important challenges, including performance bottleneck, bidirectional trust, dynamic changes of context, privacy preserving, and cross-domain issue. Some potential enabling technologies for trust management are further analyzed. The objective of this article is to comprehend the trust issue and the composition of trust management in IoT, and illustrate the difference of existing work, thereby motivating further research interest in this field.