Hybrid Fuzzy Rule Algorithm and Trust Planning Mechanism for Robust Trust Management in IoT-Embedded Systems Integration

The Internet of Things (IoT) is rapidly expanding and becoming an integral part of daily life, increasing the potential for security threats such as malware or cyberattacks. Many embedded systems (ESs), responsible for handling sensitive data or facilitating secure online activities, must adhere to stringent security standards. For instance, payment processors employ security-critical components as distinct chips, maintaining physical separation from other network components to prevent the leakage of sensitive information such as cryptographic keys. Establishing a trusted environment in IoT and ESs, where interactions are based on the trust model of communication nodes, is a viable approach to enhance security in IoT and ESs. Although trust management (TM) has been extensively studied in distributed networks, IoT, and ESs, significant challenges remain for real-world implementation. In response, we propose a hybrid fuzzy rule algorithm (FRA) and trust planning mechanism (TPM), denoted FRA + TPM, for effective trust management and to bolster IoT and ESs reliability. The proposed system was evaluated against several conventional methods, yielding promising results: trust prediction accuracy (99%), energy consumption (53%), malicious node detection (98%), computation time (61 s), latency (1.7 ms), and throughput (9 Mbps).