Robustness to on-off dishonest recommenders in a trust management framework for a mobile ad hoc network

Dishonest recommenders can have an impact upon the trust management framework of a mobile ad hoc network through the launch of an on-off attack pattern which involves periodic good behaviors so as to evade detection and avoid the trust degradation. The current paper presents the design of a recommendation trust update module which aims to achieve robustness against such on-off dishonest recommenders by considering the consistency of behaviors to dynamically decide the fading/aging factor which determines the weight to be given to past behaviors and current behaviors so as to compute an overall trust estimate which reflects the true nature of the node. The robustness of the scheme and the accuracy of trust computation in the presence of on-off dishonest recommenders are demonstrated through simulation results.