Attacks on trust evaluation in distributed networks

Evaluation of trustworthiness of participating entities is an effective method to stimulate collaboration and improve network security in distributed networks. Similar to other security related protocols, trust evaluation is an attractive target for adversaries. Currently, the vulnerabilities of trust evaluation system have not been well understood. In this paper, we present several attacks that can undermine the accuracy of trust evaluation, and then develop defense techniques. Based on our investigation on attacks and defense, we implement a trust evaluation system in ad hoc networks for securing ad hoc routing and assisting malicious node detection. Extensive simulations are performed to illustrate various attacks, the effectiveness of the proposed defense techniques, and the overall performance of the trust evaluation system. © 2006 IEEE