A Survey on Trust Management for WBAN: Investigations and Future Directions

Abstract

The rapid uptake of the Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) and their services poses unprecedented security requirements. WBAN are evolving to support these requirements. Fulfilling these tasks is challenging as their mobile context is increasingly complex, heterogeneous, and evolving. One potential solution to meet the WBAN security requirements is trust management that helps to reach a more secure and adaptable WBAN environment. Accordingly, this article aims to serve as a brief survey of trust management approaches within intra-WBAN and inter-WBAN. For that, we first summarize trust management concepts, discuss WBAN challenges and classify the attacks on WBAN trust management models. Subsequently, we detail and compare the existing trust based approaches in a WBAN context. We pinpoint their limitations and provide a new classification of these different approaches. We also propose a set of best practices that may help the reader to build a robust and an efficient trust management framework. We complete this survey by highlighting the open future directions and perspectives for research.