ATM: Automated Trust Management for Mobile Ad-hoc Networks Using Support Vector Machine

Mobile Ad-hoc NETworks (MANETs) are extremely susceptible to various misbehaviors and a variety of trust management schemes have been proposed to detect and mitigate them. Most schemes rely on a set of pre-defined weights to determine how the extent of each misbehavior is used to evaluate the trustworthiness. However, due to the extremely dynamic nature of MANETs, it is not possible to determine a set of weights that are appropriate for all contexts. In this paper, an Automated Trust Management (ATM) system is described for MANETs that uses a support vector machine classifier to detect malicious MANET nodes. The ATM scheme is resilient to attempts by a malicious MANET node to hide its nature by varying its misbehavior patterns over time. The performance of the ATM scheme is evaluated via an extensive simulation study and compared with existing approaches.