StackTrust: Intent-Based IoT Trust Management Framework for Secure Communications

The widespread adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) devices increases the need for trust management systems that adapt to dynamic conditions and maintain reliability under diverse threats. This paper introduces StackTrust, a trust management framework designed for scalable and precise IoT security. The framework integrates decision trees, support vector machines, and random forests within a logistic regression meta-learner to enhance classification robustness. A central feature is the adaptive weighting mechanism, which periodically adjusts the influence of each base model according to current performance metrics. To further stabilize predictions, a logarithmic historical-trust function incorporates long-term behavioral evidence while reducing sensitivity to short-term fluctuations. The combined trust score converges to a stable equilibrium under bounded model outputs. StackTrust supports both centralized and decentralized architectures and is validated through NS-3 simulations across multiple datasets and attack scenarios. Results on 45,000 instances confirm precision, recall, and F1-scores of 0.99, with computational complexity of <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">O</i>(<italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">N</i> ×<italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">T</i>) and <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">O</i>(<italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">M</i>×<italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">T</i>) to ensure efficiency for resource-constrained IoT environments.