A new trust model for trustworthiness-based routing protocols in sensor networks

For wireless sensor networks (WSNs), particularly those deployed in adversary environment, a major concern is how to the provide security to the carried data by using various security primitives, while maintain the trustworthiness among the nodes in the networks. A commonly used strategy is to assume that there exists a public key infrastructure (PKI) or other certificate authority (CA) during its deployment in the network. However, an initially trusted node may become compromised due to various attacks launched by malicious nodes. The major problem is how to build up and update the trust among the nodes. In this paper, we propose a new model to estimate the trustworthiness among the nodes. The value of the trustworthiness can be observed by each node independently. To demonstrate the applicability, we combine the trustworthiness model with an anonymous routing protocol and propose a new secure trustworthiness-based anonymous routing (STAR) protocol. The trustworthiness of a node is selected as a routing metric so that the nodes with malicious behavior can be avoided. The simulation results have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed trustworthiness model, which has increased the security and improved the performance of the anonymous protocol.