A Dynamic Recommendation-based Trust Scheme for the Smart Grid

The integration of the internet of things (IoT) concept into the traditional electricity grid introduces several critical vulnerabilities. Intrusion detection systems (IDSs) can be effective countermeasures against cyberattacks, however, they require considerable computational and storage resources. As IoT-enabled metering devices have limited resources, IDSs cannot efficiently ensure security. To this end, trust evaluation schemes have emerged as promising solutions toward protecting resource-constrained metering devices. In this work, we proposed a trust evaluation scheme for the smart grid, that is based on direct trust evaluation and recommendation. The proposed hierarchical scheme is able to evaluate the trustiness of each metering device without requiring any significant modifications to the already deployed infrastructure. Additionally, the proposed scheme features is dynamic, meaning that it is robust against non-adversarial events that negatively impact the device’s trustiness. To validate the performance of the proposed scheme, we carry out network-level simulations and investigate how the various network parameters impact the trust evaluation performance.