Countering the collusion attack with a multidimensional decentralized trust and reputation model in disconnected MANETs

The FIRE trust and reputation model is a de-centralized trust model that can be applied for trust management in unstructured Peer-to-Peer (P2P) overlays. The FIRE model does not, however, consider malicious activity and possible collusive behavior in nodes of network and it is therefore susceptible to collusion attacks. This investigation reveals that FIRE is vulnerable to lying and cheating attacks and presents a trust management approach to detect collusion in direct and witness interactions among nodes based on colluding node’s history of interactions. A witness ratings based graph building approach is utilized to determine possibly collusive behavior among nodes. Furthermore, various interaction policies are defined to detect and prevent collaborative behavior in colluding nodes. Finally a multidimensional trust model FIRE+ is devised for avoiding collusion attacks in direct and witness based interactions. The credibility of the proposed trust management scheme as an enhancement of the FIRE trust model is verified by extensive simulation experiments.