A New Trust Management Framework for Detecting Malicious and Selfish Behaviour for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

With the development of wireless network applications, wireless networks need more interactions between many entities, and a rapidly increasing requirement for designing secure applications among these entities is trust management. Therefore, a lot of attacks against distributed environment are aimed at the trust management. This article presents a new trust management framework (TMF) for Mobile Ad hoc Networks. The proposed framework calculates a node's trust value based on observations from neighbour nodes by using Grey theory and Fuzzy sets. The TMF chooses multiple rather than a single parameter to obtain trust values. Simulations conducted in a Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET, 802.11-based) with Random Waypoint Mobility Mode show what the proposed framework can do is not only detecting abnormal trust behaviour, but also discovering which parameter for forming trust values of a mobile node is abnormal, that means it can identify the possible attack strategy in both static and mobile environment. The TMF has shown good performance in calculating trust values of mobile wireless nodes under normal and abnormal (attack) conditions, and hence can be considered as an effective trust framework for MANETs.