A Trust Evaluation Method with Collaborative Active Detection for D2D-enabled Networks

Device-to-Device (D2D) communication emerges as a pivotal technology for enhancing the capacity and coverage of networks. Nonetheless, these networks are vulnerable to threats posed by malicious devices (MDs) that have the potential to tamper with transmitted content, thereby com-promising the network’s reliability. The trust model is one of the effective methods to solve such internal attacks. Previous research mainly evaluated device trust based on social similarity and passive trust models. These methods make it difficult to obtain accurate evaluation results. Even though there are some active trust models, they have limitations such as high cost and limited scope of application. To solve the above problems, we propose a low-cost collaborative active detection trust evaluation method. In this method, the device first generates some smaller detection packets, verification codes and sends them directly to the trusted alliance party. Then, during each trust eval-uation process, the device determines the trust of nodes on the multi-hop path by actively sending these detection packets to the trusted alliance party. Experimental results show that, compared with existing strategies, our proposed strategy can achieve higher trust evaluation accuracy with lower energy consumption.