Manipulator: A Novel Collusion Attack on Trust Management Systems in Social IoT

Abstract

Billions of smart devices communicate with each other in the era of IoT. They share data, contribute to make decisions and sense to cooperatively perform business operations. The IoT devices implement social networking paradigms to overcome uncertainty and achieve better results. This enhances Social IoT (SIoT), a relatively new subset of IoT where smart entities form a social network of their own to provide better quality of service. Trust is what holds this social togetherness. There are various trust management protocols for managing trust between IoT entities. They were verified with known trust-related attacks such as self-promoting, bad-mouthing, ballot-stuffing etc. In this work a new trust-related attack called manipulator is introduced. It is based on historical trust consideration mechanism in trust management systems established as a safeguard for known attacks. Manipulator attack takes advantage of systems proactive interception on lack of trust and transform it to a friendly fire by deceiving that non-malicious entities were also in collusion all along. The vulnerable trust management schemes in literature against manipulator attack were discussed as well. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.