Analysis of Feedback Evaluation for Trust Management Models in the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is transforming the world into an ecosystem of objects that communicate with each other to enrich our lives. The devices’ collaboration allows the creation of complex applications, where each object can provide one or more services needed for global benefit. The information moves to nodes in a peer-to-peer network, in which the concept of trustworthiness is essential. Trust and Reputation Models (TRMs) are developed with the goal of guaranteeing that actions taken by entities in a system reflect their trustworthiness values and to prevent these values from being manipulated by malicious entities. The cornerstone of any TRM is the ability to generate a coherent evaluation of the information received. Indeed, the feedback generated by the consumers of the services has a vital role as the source of any trust model. In this paper, we focus on the generation of the feedback and propose different metrics to evaluate it. Moreover, we illustrate a new collusive attack that influences the evaluation of the received services. Simulations with a real IoT dataset show the importance of feedback generation and the impact of the new proposed attack.