Trust Management for Cyber Physical Systems and IoT Networks: New Communications and Data Centric Model

Cyber Physical systems are a subset of IoT technology, they integrate IoT with the physical world using devices such as sensors actuators and PLCs. These technologies are increasingly being used in everyday life in areas such as industry, agriculture, and health care 4.0 , smart homes and autonomous vehicles. The integration of such technologies brings many benefits, streamlining industrial and agricultural processes, improving healthcare, and increasing safety on roadways. However, to enable all the benefits of CPS and IoT technologies implies most devices, appliances and machines be interconnected, which will in turn leave them more vulnerable to being exploited from malicious entities. Security issues pose one of the biggest threats to these technologies’ development and uptake and conventional security methods often are not enough to combat attacks on these network architectures. Trust management within IoT networks offers a low powered and effective solutions to detecting malicious nodes within an IoT network by monitoring network and node parameters to determine whether the behaviour of each node on the network can be trusted or not. The work presented here discusses previous works on trust models and a new model, centred around data and communications monitoring is presented for use in an IoT water management system. The model uses time windows to calculate and update trust at regular intervals to ensure constant updating to any changeable behaviours on the network. The addition of dynamic threshold calculation allows the model to be very flexible in many different network environments and resilient to network wide changes in behaviour. Results of initial testing of the model are discussed.