A survey of collaborative services and security-related issues in modern wireless Ad-Hoc communications

The use of collaboration has recently started to spread to a wide range of services in modern wireless Ad-Hoc networks, for which it is offering valuable advantages in terms of optimization and resilience. However, allowing collaboration among wireless devices opens the way to a new class of threats that involve internal attackers. In this work, we provide an extensive analysis of the existing collaborative networking services in wireless networks and examine the new threats that are introduced by those collaborative mechanisms. From a study of the security measures proposed in the literature to counter these attacks, we identify two categories of countermeasures, namely security-by-design mechanisms and Trust Management Systems (TMSs). A specific discussion is devoted in this paper to the latter category, which offers the advantage of being more flexible. Aiming at further improving this flexibility by making the design of TMSs adapted to the advent of the Internet of Things, we propose a set of guidelines in order for these systems to fit the new requirements of modern wireless communications.