Abstract
Securing communications and information sharing within the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm is challenging because of the increase in the size and mobility of the user population. Moreover, managing a central security architecture requires adaptability and integration with a cloud network. In this manuscript, a trust-based monitoring (TBM) scheme was designed for improving the security features in cloud-assisted IoT environments. This security scheme employs middleware and intelligent agents for managing user- and communication-level security. TBM operates in three security administering phases namely spoof detection, trust construction, and message authentication. The intelligent agents are responsible for ensuring secure communication by exchanging trust and signal strength observations with the middleware. These agents also assist with monitoring, processing, and task switching to reduce communication costs. TBM was evaluated through extensive simulations. The results demonstrate its consistency in achieving lower response and detection times, misdetection probabilities, and false positive rates. In addition, it was found to improve network lifetime through reduced energy consumption.