Trust Enhanced Secure Mobile Ad-Hoc Network Routing

In recent years, several trust and reputation models have been proposed to enhance the security of mobile ad hoc networks. However, they either fail to capture evidence of trustworthiness within the limitations of the network, or introduce additional problems while capturing the evidence. In this paper, we propose a reputation-based trust model known as secure MANET routing with trust intrigue (SMRTI). In our model, the evidence of trustworthiness is captured in an efficient manner and from broader perspectives including direct interactions with neighbours, observing interactions of neighbours and through recommendations. SMRTI captures evidence from direct interactions with neighbours in order to identify their benign and malicious behaviours. It also captures evidence for misbehaviours by observing the interactions of neighbours. Lastly, the evidence captured from recommendations is used to summarize the benign behaviour of multi-hop nodes. Unlike other models, we adopt a novel approach to capture evidence from recommendations, which eliminates recommender´s bias, free-riding, and honest- elicitation. SMRTI utilizes the captured evidence to predict whether a node is either benign or misbehaving. It then applies the prediction to enhance the security of communications depending on the decision policies, such as whether to send a packet to or forward a packet on behalf of other nodes. Finally, we demonstrate the performance of our model through simulation results.