Trust-Based Attack and Defense in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey

Abstract

As a key component of the information sensing and aggregating for big data, cloud computing, and Internet of Things (IoT), the information security in wireless sensor network (WSN) is critical. Due to constrained resources of sensor node, WSN is becoming a vulnerable target to many security attacks. Compared to external attacks, it is more difficult to defend against internal attacks. The former can be defended by using encryption and authentication schemes. However, this is invalid for the latter, which can obtain all keys of the network. The studies have proved that the trust management technology is one of effective approaches for detecting and defending against internal attacks. Hence, it is necessary to investigate and review the attack and defense with trust management. In this paper, the state-of-the-art trust management schemes are deeply investigated for WSN. Moreover, their advantages and disadvantages are symmetrically compared and analyzed in defending against internal attacks. The future directions of trust management are further provided. Finally, the conclusions and prospects are given.