Dishonest recommendation attacks in wireless sensor networks: A survey

Trust and reputation models in wireless sensor networks (WSN) have been recently proposed by many researches as an innovative solution for guaranteeing an effective security mechanism. They play an important role in defending WSNs such as securing routing and data forwarding protocols, against insider attacks. However, despite of the advantages, reputation models face with several security issues, especially in the case of dishonest recommendation attacks, i.e. slandering, self-promoting and collusion where participants might give recommendations deviated from their real experience. In this paper we survey the current research related to dishonest recommendation attacks in WSNs. We have classified the schemes studied in two main categories: avoiding dishonest recommendations and dealing with dishonest recommendations. We provide an overview and a comparative study of these schemes and highlight the future research directions to address the drawbacks of existing protocols.