Trust in Edge-Enabled IoT Security: Features, Challenges and Research Directions

Abstract:Providing autonomous intelligence, pervasive connectivity and usability to human life and industry has led to the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT). To support time-sensitive and resource-constrained applications, IoT systems nowadays increasingly rely on edge computing. This brings computation and decision-making closer to end devices. In edge-enabled IoT architecture, latency and communication overhead are reduced, but interactions among a larger and more diverse set of devices, edge nodes, services, and data sources are introduced as well. In such environments, security and privacy mechanisms provide the foundation for protection, while trust management can assess the reliability of interacting entities and adapting secure decisions. In this paper, we systematically review the current state of trust management in edge-enabled IoT. To this end, we propose a comprehensive taxonomy that maps physical, network, and application architectural IoT layers against the consumer, commercial, industrial, and infrastructure IoT domains. We further investigate state-of-art research based on their trust design, how trust integrated into secure IoT operations, the attacks that effect trust management process. Based on these findings, we identify key gaps in current research and outline future directions for context-aware and adaptive trust management in edge-enabled IoT.

Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computers and Society (cs.CY); Emerging Technologies (cs.ET); Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI)

arXiv:2609.24669 [cs.CR]

(or arXiv:2609.24669v1 [cs.CR] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.24669 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)