Trust and Risk Assessment Approach for Access Control in Wireless Sensor Networks

When deploying wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in practical applications, access control systems can limit access to sensitive information only to trusted entities and provide a capability to resist against various attacks from malicious nodes. However, due to the characteristics of highly distributed and resource-constrained, applying conventional access control models to WSNs is significantly challenging. In this paper, a distributed and fine-grained access control model based on the trust and risk degree is proposed (TC-BAC). We first introduce a trust evaluation mechanism to meet the security requirements of access control systems. Then, a risk function is proposed to assess the behavior of nodes and evaluate the risk factor of the access. The simulation results show that TC-BAC can achieve both intended security and high efficiency of the network.