Wireless ad-hoc networks are becoming popular due to the emergence of the Internet of Things and cyber-physical systems (CPSs). Due to the open wireless medium, secure routing functionality becomes important. However, the current solutions focus on a constrain set of network vulnerabilities and do not provide protection against newer attacks. In this paper, we propose SCOTRES - a trust-based system for secure routing in ad-hoc networks which advances the intelligence of network entities by applying five novel metrics. The energy metric considers the resource consumption of each node, imposing similar amount of collaboration, and increasing the lifetime of the network. The topology metric is aware of the nodes' positions and enhances load-balancing. The channel-health metric provides tolerance in periodic malfunctioning due to bad channel conditions and protects the network against jamming attacks. The reputation metric evaluates the cooperation of each participant for a specific network operation, detecting specialized attacks, while the trust metric estimates the overall compliance, safeguarding against combinatorial attacks. Theoretic analysis validates the security properties of the system. Performance and effectiveness are evaluated in the network simulator 2, integrating SCOTRES with the DSR routing protocol. Similar schemes are implemented using the same platform in order to provide a fair comparison. Moreover, SCOTRES is deployed on two typical embedded system platforms and applied on real CPSs for monitoring environmental parameters of a rural application on olive groves. As is evident from the above evaluations, the system provides the highest level of protection while retaining efficiency for real application deployments.
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