Distributed Trust and Reputation Services in Pervasive Internet-of-Things Deployments

Cyberprotection in the context of Internet-of-Things (IoT) includes three basic areas: security, privacy and trust. Security and privacy technologies are related to mechanisms such as cryptography or authentication protocols that have been extensively explored and adapted to IoT requirements. However, new risks such as cyber-physical attacks and novel distributed, and pervasive architectures reveal new weaknesses where trust and reputation issues are the main challenges to be addressed. Nevertheless, both, trust and reputation, are intrinsically subjective and distributed, and algorithms guaranteeing a dynamic and efficient management of these properties tend to be computationally heavy and complex. In this context, new trust and reputation services for pervasive IoT deployments are needed. Therefore, in this paper we propose a new distributed architecture for the provision of trust and reputation services in IoT systems. The architecture is based on Blockchain technologies and the composition of different conceptual models (cognitive, computational, neurological, and game-theoretical) using stochastic functions. The resulting probability may be employed by nodes to create their own trustworthy subsystem. In order to validate the performance and usability of the proposal, an experimental validation based on simulation technologies is provided.