Towards trustworthy Internet of Things: A survey on Trust Management applications and schemes

Advancement in technology with the proliferation of new wireless communication protocols gave rise to the new era of ubiquitous computing, called Internet of Things (IoT). IoT facilitates connectivity between various heterogeneous physical devices through the internet to advantage users with intelligent and more advanced services. Effective utilization of these services demands a secure system where one can rely on the source of the information together with the received information. Trust Management (TM) is a crucial aspect of security that aims to maintain reliability in a system by ensuring the secure exchange of information. Using the concept of local and global perception about the reputation, TM measures the degree of trust on the system’s entities and endeavors to reduce risk and uncertainty in the system. For IoT, TM paves the way to accomplish various decision-making tasks, like reliable service composition, secure routing, device authentication, access control, etc. However, design and deployment of TM for IoT are hindered by the inherent characteristics of IoT systems that demand to be addressed. In this paper, we identified various applications of TM and examined issues in the design and deployment of TM for IoT. A clear vision towards TM system, explaining the different phases involved in the process of managing the trust, is presented. Furthermore, an exhaustive survey on various TM schemes developed for IoT with their applicability and addressing issues is provided. The survey is conducted considering direct observations and indirect recommendations based distributed, semi-distributed, and centralized schemes along with the review on blockchain technology-based schemes for trust management in IoT. In addition to that, a comparative study of the existing schemes based on the various system measures like computation model, input attributes, evaluation tool, and performance metrics examining their strengths and weaknesses is given. Finally, the paper highlights open research challenges investigated by the survey to present future direction for the researchers.