FogTrust: Fog-Integrated Multi-Leveled Trust Management Mechanism for Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is widely used to reduce human dependence. It is a network of interconnected smart devices with internet connectivity that can send and receive data. However, the rapid growth of IoT devices has raised security and privacy concerns, with the identification and removal of compromised and malicious nodes being a major challenge. To overcome this, a lightweight trust management mechanism called FogTrust is proposed. It has a multi-layer architecture that includes edge nodes, a trusted agent, and a fog layer. The trust agent acts as an intermediary authority, communicating with both IoT nodes and the fog layer for computation. This reduces the burden on nodes and ensures a trustworthy environment. The trust agent calculates the trust degree and transmits it to the fog layer, which uses encryption to maintain integrity. The encrypted value is shared with the trust agent for aggregation to improve the trust degree’s accuracy. The performance of the FogTrust approach was evaluated against various potential attacks, including On-off, Good-mouthing, and Bad-mouthing. The simulation results demonstrate that it effectively assigns low trust degrees to malicious nodes in different scenarios, even with varying percentages of malicious nodes in the network.