In Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), the Trust Mechanism (TM) is used to defend against insider attacks by measuring the trustworthiness of all inside sensor nodes in the network. Thus, each sensor node with TM observes its neighbor nodes’ behaviors, evaluates their trustworthiness as numeric trust values, and captures untrustworthy nodes as inside attackers. Although the defense performance of trust mechanisms can be further improved by sharing the information about inside attackers detected by TM with all sensor nodes, the detected inside attacker list must be securely shared with and stored in all sensor nodes in the WSN. However, according to our survey, we observed that most existing studies simply assume that the communication channel for sharing the attacker detection list is reliable and trusted even in the presence of inside attackers in the WSN. In this paper, we propose and implement a proactive defense model that integrates the HyperLedger Fabric and trust mechanism to defend against inside attackers by securely sharing the detected inside attacker list with all sensor nodes in the WSN. In addition, we conduct comparative experiments to show that our proposed model can better defend against inside attackers than an existing trust mechanism. According to our experimental results, our proposed model could lower the attack damage (the number of packet drops) caused by an inside packet drop attacker by 59 to 67% compared to an existing trust mechanism.
Trust Mechanisms to Secure Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks: Current State of the Research and Open Research Issues