Title: CRTC-SIoT: a context-aware and resilient trust computation model for social IoT

Authors: Santhosh Kumari; S.M. Dilip Kumar

Addresses: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University Visvesvaraya College of Engineering, Bangalore University, Bengaluru – 560001, India ' Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University Visvesvaraya College of Engineering, Bangalore University, Bengaluru – 560001, India

Abstract: The social internet of things (SIoT) enhances the internet of things (IoT) by integrating social networking into device connectivity and communication. Trust models evaluate entities' trustworthiness to enable secure exchanges with reliable peers and minimise harmful interactions. Current methods lack balance and fail to account for changing social relationships and varied node behaviours across services. This research proposes a context-aware and resilient trust computation (CRTC) model that uses direct trust service, degree of participation, social relationship trust, and recommended trust to determine trust scores. Simulation tests and security assessments have confirmed its efficacy. The model categorises nodes with 100% precision, 93% recall, a 96% F1-score, and 94% accuracy with 25% malicious nodes. It resists various trust-based attacks and maintains over 85% service success rates in environments with up to 80% malicious nodes. The model identifies malicious nodes in two transactions and trustworthy nodes in four transactions.

Keywords: trust computation model; social internet of things; SIoT; direct trust service; degree of participation; social relationship trust; resiliency; trust-based attacks; context-awareness.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAHUC.2026.152198

International Journal of Ad Hoc and Ubiquitous Computing, 2026 Vol.51 No.2, pp.90 - 103

Received: 17 Nov 2024
Accepted: 24 Apr 2025
Published online: 10 Mar 2026 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article