Interaction-Aware Trust Management Scheme for IoT Systems With Machine-Learning-Based Attack Detection

The recent Internet of Things (IoT) adoption has revolutionized various applications while introducing significant security and privacy challenges. Traditional security solutions are unsuitable for IoT systems due to their dynamicity, heterogeneity, and resource constraints. Trust-based solutions are emerging as promising alternatives due to their ability to track the dynamic behavior in IoT systems. However, existing trust management schemes are implemented at the device level, raising several challenges, including device modification, that compromises certification and scalability, increased network overhead, and higher device resource utilization. To address these challenges, this article proposes a novel trust management scheme that shifts its implementation to a higher layer in the IoT system, specifically to the IoT access layer (e.g., gateway). The proposed scheme establishes trust based on typical device interactions with the gateway without requiring additional information from the device. It relies on objective attributes spanning communication, security, and advanced dimensions to compute the trust value of an IoT device. Additionally, an artificial neural network (ANN) is integrated to determine if the device acts maliciously or behaves normally. Simulation results demonstrate a notable improvement in the detection rate, primarily due to incorporating the proposed ANN, compared to the threshold-based approaches in the literature. Overall, the improvements highlight the significant advantage of the proposed scheme’s robustness.