Towards a flexible trust establishment framework for sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks highly depend on the distributed cooperation among network nodes. Trust establishment frameworks provide the means for representing, evaluating, maintaining and distributing trust within the network, and serve as the basis for higher level security services. In this paper, we propose a trust establishment framework targeted sensor networks that can uniformly support the needs of nodes with highly diverse network roles and capabilities, by exploiting the pre-deployment knowledge on the network topology and the information flows. The framework allows for flexibility by combining aspects from alternative approaches on trust establishment on common evaluation metrics, and enables controlled trust evolution based on the network pre-configuration.