Leveraging Remote Attestation to enhance the Unified Trust Model for WSNs

Fetching information invisibly with the least human intervention in a pervasive computing environment raises several security and trust issues. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) as the building block of pervasive computing environments are studied well in the literature. However, because of the constraints on their platform, security and trust are still ignored in the deployments. Remote Attestation can help to identify the tampered sensor nodes which are normally left unattended and can be easily compromised. Trusted computing can effectively enables the current solutions to verify the trustworthiness of computing platforms. However, the resource-constrained nature of wireless sensors inhibits implementing the full functionalities of the trusted computing mechanisms for applicable solutions in other pervasive systems. In this paper, we discuss the problem of current remote attestation mechanisms and trust models in WSNs. Next, we review the Unified Trust Model (UTM), which assumes the wireless nodes are equipped with TPM and can verify the integrity of its neighbors. We performed simulation and analysis of the UTM using a Trust and Reputation Models Simulator for Wireless Sensor Networks, and demonstrated its accuracy and performance. From the analysis of the experiments, we deduced that by including TC-enabled nodes in the proposed model have notably increased the accuracy of trust evaluation in pervasive environments and can effectively increase the response of the model to malicious node attacks. Finally, we describe our future research plan to evaluate our model by comparing it with the different related models.