GlobalTrust: An attack-resilient reputation system for tactical networks

In a military tactical network where a trust authority (e.g., a commander) makes a decision during a mission, assessing the trustworthiness of participating entities accurately is critical to mission success. In this work, we propose a trust-based reputation management scheme, called GlobalTrust, for minimizing false decisions on the reputation of nodes in the network. In the proposed scheme, nodes may be compromised and provide incorrect opinions to the trust authority, who conducts reputation evaluation towards all nodes based on the provided opinions. GlobalTrust achieves three goals: (1) maintaining a consistent global view towards each node; (2) obtaining high resiliency against various attack patterns; and (3) attaining highly accurate reputation values of nodes. Through extensive simulations comparing GlobalTrust with other existing schemes, we show that GlobalTrust minimizes false decisions while maintaining high resilience against various attack behaviors. Specifically, under various attacks, GlobalTrust can achieve a highly accurate consistent view on nodes' reputations even when the number of malicious nodes is up to 40% of all participating nodes.