Phoenix: IoT Trust Evaluation Using Game Theory with Second Chance Protocol
Himan Namdari, Cihan Tunc, Ram Dantu · 2023
Internet of Things (IoT) devices are a big part of our daily lives for their use in smart environments and open fields. However, IoT devices, characterized by limited computational capabilities and energy constraints, are prone to malfunctions and cyberattacks. This vulnerability raises substantial trust issues, particularly concerning the reliability of the data they provide. This paper proposes a hierarchical trust evaluation methodology by incorporating game theory and Bayesian inference designed for IoT devices to address the trust evaluation issue. We also explored the impact of historical behavior, such as nodes’ age and trust ratio improving our trust evaluation results. Furthermore, we proposed a technique named "second chance protocol" to identify a transitory malfunctioning node and introduce it back to the network once it regains trustworthiness, resulting in resource optimization and enhancing average trust in the model. We generated synthetic data to evaluate the proposed approaches with randomly distributed noise levels simulating failures or compromised IoT devices. The results of our experimental analysis demonstrate that our approach improves the overall trust ratio of the system concerning traditional approaches. The proposed second chance protocol further enhances the trust average and device utilization by accurately identifying malfunctioning nodes. Our result with different noise levels achieves five to ten times better than an alternative study. Finally, our model achieved a detection rate of 97.99%, 89%, and 79% for 10%, 20%, and 30% noise levels.