A Light-weight Trust Mechanism for Cloud-Edge Collaboration Framework

With the development of the edge computing and cloud computing technology, the cloud-edge collaboration framework is proposed as a new effective computing architecture and applied in many fields. However, due to the openness of the edge networks, the security of cloud-edge framework is an unavoidable problem and most recent trust mechanism could not resist mixed malicious attacks at the same time. In this work, a light-weight and reliable trust mechanism based on the improved LightGBM algorithm is originally proposed to evaluate the credibility of edge devices. First, we design a light-weight trust mechanism for edge devices to process raw interaction data and extract trust features, which reduces the amount of data transmission and the pressure on the communication networks. In addition, an evaluation algorithm based on the entropy weight method (EWM) and punishment factors is designed for edge brokers to distinguish the malicious devices from the normal ones, which performs great against mixed malicious attacks. At last, we propose an improved LightGBM algorithm developed in the centralized cloud to learn other researchers’ evaluation methods and check the evaluation uploaded from edge brokers, which could make the punishment factors of edge networks weighted adaptively with the change of edge networks. The experimental results show the proposed trust mechanism outperforms existing methods in the accuracy and discriminating speed under mixed malicious attacks.