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Top1. Introduction
Internet of Things (IoT) makes considerable attention in both application domains and academic research because of its unique characteristics. It is an interdisciplinary framework in which things surrounding us are associated with the internet to provide smart and efficient services. Many of the application domains use IoT to offer new services or enhance the efficiency of the existing services (Samie et al., 2016). Such applications are transporting, environmental monitoring, e-health, industrial monitoring, smart agriculture, public safety, military application, etc (Sung et al., 2012). When designing IoT applications, some of the key characteristics should consider managing with additional challenges that are constrained resources in IoT devices, an extremely large volume of data collected from various applications, and distributed network environments (Sheng et al., 2015).
Implementing the IoT concept in a battlefield environment may import numerous advantages, and can perform a higher level of operational efficiency. Modern military uniforms, battlefield objects, and weapon systems are highly equipped with sensor nodes that can aggregate and deal with the data on the place of the authorized objects and their surroundings. Incorporation of all the things within the IoT infrastructure gives an enormous amount of information for context-awareness applications (Glowacka et al., 2015). On the Internet of Battlefield Things (IoBT), the intelligence devices (Things) occupy the world of military battles where devices can interact with each other that helps armed forces on the battlefield. In the next few decades, IoBT becomes a primary existence that is widely occupied by the different categories of objects on the battlefield, many of these objects are too smart and few are only normal. Battlefield things perform a wide range of tasks including communicating, sensing, and collaborating. These things include weapons, sensors, robots, vehicles, and human-wearable devices. The task of these devices involves collecting and processing specific information, acting as agents to assist sense-making, attempt to coordinate defensive actions, and discharge different types of action on the adversary. These can be achieved collaboratively, all the things on the battlefield regularly interact, coordinate, consult, plan, and execute their actions.
In the real-time implementation, it faces a unique set of challenges including heterogeneous, highly dynamic, and largely unpredictable environment, collecting and processing data, restricted resources, collaboration, security threat from an adversary, the trustworthiness of the nodes, etc (Kott et al., 2016). Wireless sensor nodes used in a restricted environment like battlefield networks are highly vulnerable to various attacks (Jaitly et al., 2017). The adversary may access the communication channel between the sender and receiver, then modify or drop the data packets that are transferred to this communication channel (Bhushan et al., 2017). Therefore, providing security in such a network is a primary concern (Jaitly et al., 2017).
Providing standard security services such as confidentiality, authentication, integrity, authorization, non- reputation and availability are the considerable obstacles for the node's deployment in the Battlefield Environment. Among these services, the authentication of different heterogeneous entities is the main concern for a military-based application that needs to be addressed.
Every single object in the IoT network can authenticate and validate each other in the network. In IoT, authentication is defined as the ability to protect data and restrict it only to the appropriate permissions (Varshney et al., 2019). Group communication systems in the IoBT require teamwork and cooperation to accomplish the mission. It mainly depends on the trust communication among the team members (Ing-Ray Chen, 2010). Traditional cryptography-based authentication mechanisms cannot be adopted in IoT devices because of its restricted resources including memory, processing, battery power, etc. Thus, a trust-based solution plays an important role to identify the malicious nodes/devices in the battlefield environment. Therefore, the proposed model provides a trust-based solution in the IoBT environment which ensures the secure Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) and isolates the malicious nodes (Rank attacker), by isolating rank attacker authentication can be achieved in the battlefield environment.