Node-Level Trust Evaluation in Wireless Sensor Networks

Traditional cryptographic methods do not cater to the limitations of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) primarily concerning code size, processing time, and power consumption. The study in this paper enumerates the security primitives in WSNs and accentuates the strength of trust evaluation as a security solution within the WSN precincts. This paper proposes a trust evaluation methodology that evaluates a node-level trust by using an internal resource of a node. It is a completely mediating technique which is independent of network topology and second-hand information. The challenge response method enables a node to evaluate trust for itself; and with its peer-node/s with which it intends to interact using the proposed self-scrutiny and self-attestation algorithms, respectively. The efficacy of the proposed software-based methodology and the algorithms is demonstrated with the actual implementation on sensor nodes. The ability to counter attack-scenarios along with the analysis exhibits the merit of the proposed work. The average values of the observed results illustrate the consistency and robust performance of the proposed trust evaluation algorithms.