Towards Tamper-Proof Trust Evaluation of Internet of Things Nodes Leveraging IOTA Ledger

Trust evaluation has become a major challenge in the quickly developing Internet of Things (IoT) environment because of the vulnerabilities and security hazards associated with networked devices. To overcome these obstacles, this study offers a novel approach for evaluating trust that uses IOTA Tangle technology. By decentralizing the trust evaluation process, our approach reduces the risks related to centralized solutions, including privacy violations and single points of failure. To offer a thorough and reliable trust evaluation, this study combines direct and indirect trust measures. Moreover, we incorporate IOTA-based trust metrics to evaluate a node's trust based on its activity in creating and validating IOTA transactions. The proposed framework ensures data integrity and secrecy by implementing immutable, secure storage for trust scores on IOTA. This ensures that no node transmits a wrong trust score for itself. The results show that the proposed scheme is efficient compared to recent literature, achieving up to +3.5% higher malicious node detection accuracy, up to 93% improvement in throughput, 40% reduction in energy consumption, and up to 24% lower end-to-end delay across various network sizes and adversarial conditions. Our contributions improve the scalability, security, and dependability of trust assessment processes in Internet of Things networks, providing a strong solution to the prevailing issues in current centralized trust models.