Trust and reputation management for opportunistic dissemination

Abstract Nodes in opportunistic networks need to cooperate to disseminate data. However, employing intermediate nodes for dissemination leads to several security issues. Here, we propose an opportunistic trust and reputation mechanism entitled SAROS, which detects and avoids malicious nodes, i.e. nodes which, upon receiving messages for other interested peers, modify their content in order to spread false information. This can negatively affect the network, by polluting it with spam messages, or dropping messages of interest to the nodes in the network. By detecting and avoiding malicious nodes, SAROS is able to increase the percentage of correct messages that reach their destinations.