Trust-based Service Management of Internet of Things Systems and Its Applications

A future Internet of Things (IoT) system will consist of a huge quantity of heterogeneous IoT devices, each capable of providing services upon request. It is of utmost importance for an IoT device to know if another IoT service is trustworthy when requesting it to provide a service. In this dissertation research, we develop trust-based service management techniques applicable to distributed, centralized, and hybrid IoT environments.

For distributed IoT systems, we develop a trust protocol called Adaptive IoT Trust. The novelty lies in the use of distributed collaborating filtering to select trust feedback from owners of IoT nodes sharing similar social interests. We develop a novel adaptive filtering technique to adjust trust protocol parameters dynamically to minimize trust estimation bias and maximize application performance. Our adaptive IoT trust protocol is scalable to large IoT systems in terms of storage and computational costs. We perform a comparative analysis of our adaptive IoT trust protocol against contemporary IoT trust protocols to demonstrate the effectiveness of our adaptive IoT trust protocol. For centralized or hybrid cloud-based IoT systems, we propose the notion of Trust as a Service (TaaS), allowing an IoT device to query the service trustworthiness of another IoT device and also report its service experiences to the cloud. TaaS preserves the notion that trust is subjective despite the fact that trust computation is performed by the cloud. We use social similarity for filtering recommendations and dynamic weighted sum to combine self-observations and recommendations to minimize trust bias and convergence time against opportunistic service and false recommendation attacks. For large-scale IoT cloud systems, we develop a scalable trust management protocol called IoT-TaaS to realize TaaS. For hybrid IoT systems, we develop a new 3-layer hierarchical cloud structure for integrated mobility, service, and trust management. This architecture supports scalability, reconfigurability, fault tolerance, and resiliency against cloud node failure and network disconnection. We develop a trust protocol called IoT-HiTrust leveraging this 3-layer hierarchical structure to realize TaaS.

We validate our trust-based IoT service management techniques developed with real-world IoT applications, including smart city air pollution detection, augmented map travel assistance, and travel planning, and demonstrate that our trust-based IoT service management techniques outperform contemporary non-trusted and trust-based IoT service management solutions.