IoT trust and reputation: a survey and taxonomy

Abstract

IoT is one of the fastest-growing technologies and it is estimated that more than a billion devices would be utilised across the globe by the end of 2030. To maximise the capability of these connected entities, trust and reputation among IoT entities is essential. Several trust management models have been proposed in the IoT environment; however, these schemes have not fully addressed the IoT devices’ features, such as device’s role, device type and its dynamic behavior in a smart environment. As a result, traditional trust and reputation models are insufficient to tackle these characteristics and uncertainty risks while connecting nodes to the network. Whilst continuous study has been carried out and various articles suggest promising solutions in constrained environments, research on trust and reputation is still at its infancy. In this paper, we carry out a comprehensive literature review on state-of-the-art research on the trust and reputation of IoT devices and systems. Specifically, we first propose a new structure, namely a new taxonomy, to organise the trust and reputation models based on the ways trust is managed. The proposed taxonomy comprises of traditional trust management-based systems and artificial intelligence-based systems, and combine both the classes which encourage the existing schemes to adapt these emerging concepts. This collaboration between the conventional mathematical and the advanced ML models result in design schemes that are more robust and efficient. Then we drill down to compare and analyse the methods and applications of these systems based on community-accepted performance metrics,e.g. scalability, delay, cooperativeness and efficiency. Finally, built upon the findings of the analysis, we identify and discuss open research issues and challenges, and further speculate and point out future research directions.