ITRUST: AN EFFICIENT TRUST ESTABLISHMENT FOR PROBABILISTIC MISBEHAVIOR DETECTION IN DELAY TOLERANT NETWORK

In DTNs, a node could misbehave by dropping packets intentionally even when it has the capability to forward the data (e.g., sufficient buffers and meeting opportunities). Routing misbehavior can be caused by selfish (or rational) nodes that try to maximize their own benefits by enjoying the services provided by DTN while refusing to forward the bundles for others, or malicious nodes that drop packets or modifying the packets to launch attacks. Malicious and selfish behaviors represent a serious threat against routing in delay/disruption tolerant networks (DTNs). Due to the unique network characteristics, designing a misbehavior detection scheme in DTN is regarded as a great challenge. In this paper, we propose iTrust, a probabilistic misbehavior detection scheme, for secure DTN routing toward efficient trust establishment. The basic idea of iTrust is introducing a periodically available Trusted Authority (TA) to judge the node’s behavior based on the collected routing evidences and probabilistically checking. We model iTrust as the inspection game and use game theoretical analysis to demonstrate that, by setting an appropriate investigation probability, TA could ensure the security of DTN routing at a reduced cost. To further improve the efficiency of the proposed scheme, we correlate detection probability with a node’s reputation, which allows a dynamic detection probability determined by the trust of the users. The extensive analysis and simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed scheme.