The double-edged sword: Revealing the critical role of structural hole in forming trust for securing Wireless sensor networks

Security issues for Wireless sensor network (WSN) is always crucial due to its nature. The limitation of computing resources and distributed properties in WSN makes the traditional security mechanisms no longer as feasible in protecting WSN as in wired networks. There is an emerging research area to discover the alternative solutions on trust and reputation mechanisms for WSNs nowadays. The recent studies on trust are mainly focusing on trust modeling so as to effectively detect and avoid malicious activities in the network. To be able to avoid the attacks, the existence of at least an alternative route in the network is required. In this paper, we introduced the new angle of adaptive network to study the interplay between network entities´ trust evaluation and its underlie topological connectivity. Inspired from the trust studies in sociology, we found the structural hole has high efficiency in connecting different unconnected networks. But in the security side of view, it is also making the network fragile. These have been confirmed by extensive simulation studies.