Predictability trust for Wireless Sensor Networks to provide a defense against On/off attack

In Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), sensors collaborate to perform various tasks, such as routing. A trust-based routing scheme can be used to route around compromised nodes that attempt to upset this collaboration. However, because wireless connections can be unreliable, the routing protocols must provide a redemption scheme to allow nodes to recover trust. Otherwise, occasional bad behaviors due to unreliable communications can result in false alarms in malicious node detection. Existing redemption schemes fail to discriminate between temporary errors and an On/off attack in which the attacker cleverly behaves well and badly alternatively. In this paper, we present a new trust redemption scheme that cannot only discriminate between temporary errors and an On/off attack, but can also provide a flexible design. © 2012 ICST