Trust-aware and improved density peaks clustering algorithm for fast and secure models in wireless sensor networks

Many trust-based models for wireless sensor networks do not account for trust attacks, which are destructive phenomena that undermine the security and reliability of these models. Therefore, a trust-based fast security model fused with an improved density peaks clustering algorithm (TFSM-DPC) is proposed to quickly identify trust attacks in this paper. First, when calculating direct trust values, TFSM-DPC designs the adaptive penalty factors based on the state of received and sent packets and behaviors, and introduces the volatilization factors to reduce the effect of historical trust values. Second, TFSM-DPC improved density peaks clustering (DPC) algorithm to evaluate the trustworthiness of each recommendation value, thus filtering malicious recommendations before calculating the indirect trust values. Moreover, to filter two types of recommendations, the improved DPC algorithm incorporates artificial benchmark data along with trust values recommended by neighbors as input data. Finally, based on the relationship between direct trust and indirect trust, a secure formula for calculate the comprehensive trust is designed. Therefore, the proposed TFSM-DPC can improve the accuracy of trust evaluation and speed up the identification of malicious nodes. Simulation results show that TFSM-DPC can effectively identify on-off, bad-mouth and collusion attacks, and improve the speed of excluding malicious nodes from the network, compared to other trust-based algorithms.