A hybrid trust computing approach for IoT using social similarity and machine learning

Every year, millions of new devices are added to the Internet of things, which has both great benefits and serious security risks for user data privacy. It is the device owners’ responsibility to ensure that the ownership settings of Internet of things devices are maintained, allowing them to communicate with other user devices autonomously. The ultimate goal of the future Internet of Things is for it to be able to make decisions on its own, without the need for human intervention. Therefore, trust computing and prediction have become more vital in the processing and handling of data as well as in the delivery of services. In this paper, we compute trust in social IoT scenarios using a hybrid approach that combines a distributed computation technique and a global machine learning approach. The approach considers social similarity while assessing other users’ ratings and utilize a cloud-based architecture. Further, we propose a dynamic way to aggregate the different computed trust values. According to the results of the experimental work, it is shown that the proposed approaches outperform related work. Besides, it is shown that the use of machine learning provides slightly better performance than the computing model. Both proposed approaches were found successful in degrading malicious ratings without the need for more complex algorithms.