Trust in Edge-Enabled IoT Security: Features, Challenges and Research Directions

INTRODUCTION: The proliferation of the amalgamation of IoT and edge computing has increased the demand for decentralised trust and security mechanisms capable of operating across heterogeneous and resource-limited devices. Approaches such as federated learning, Zero Trust architectures, lightweight blockchain and distributed neural models offer alternatives to centralised control. OBJECTIVES: This review examines various state-of-the-art decentralised mechanisms and evaluates their effectiveness in terms of securing IoT networks at the edge. METHODS: Thirty recent studies were analysed to compare how decentralised architectures establish trust, support secure communication and enable intrusion and anomaly detection. Frameworks, such as DFGL-LZTA, SecFedDNN and COSIER were assessed. RESULTS: Decentralised designs enhance privacy, reduce single points of failure and improve adaptive threat response, though challenges remain in scalability, efficiency and interoperability. CONCLUSION: The study identifies key considerations and future research needs for building secure and resilient trust-aware IoT edge ecosystems.

AI-powered edge computing security is moving Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) from passive, rule-based protections to proactive, smart, zero-touch, self-sufficient safeguards that neutralize threats in milliseconds. As transportation becomes more connected with edge computing, massive IoT, and advanced 5G for vehicle-to-everything (V2X) connectivity, AI at the edge computing nodes plays a crucial role in protecting against sophisticated threats, enabling URLLC (ultra-low-latency communications) for smart transport, and enhancing infrastructure capabilities and safety. This research applies edge computing to improve latency, bandwidth efficiency, and service responsiveness by moving processing closer to devices, gateways, and users. However, this shift also expands the cyberattack surface because edge nodes are distributed, heterogeneous, and often resource-constrained. The paper proposes a trust-aware federated hybrid intrusion detection framework in which a random forest, a decision tree, and a linear SVM network learn complementary traffic representations at each edge site, while a server performs trust-aware aggregation of local model updates.

IoT encompasses diverse physical entities, from smart home devices to autonomous vehicles, creating a complex environment with heterogeneous security models. This heterogeneity makes IoT sub-systems vulnerable to various network attacks. Modern security systems must therefore be more robust to ensure security and privacy for IoT applications. A highly secure IoT system also demands real time insight, requiring data collection at the edge of the computing layer. This diversity calls for a unified security model applied at the foundational level. Edge intelligence offers a direct approach to handling device diversity. A key goal of edge intelligence in IoT is to extract insight from local data; security models can then use this data to build local node protections, and integrating AI models yields an advanced security solution. This research proposes a novel deep learning algorithm for effective intrusion detection at the edge, supported by a cloud-based IoT framework. We evaluate the proposed cross modal deep learning algorithm against baseline models. The contribution is a cross domain Deep Neural Network (DNN) algorithm for intrusion detection. The objective is to assess a multi-method deep learning model to detect intrusions in IoT systems at the edge via community detection with modeled attention. We evaluate GCT auto-encoder, a novel framework integrating edge intelligence to identify security flaws. The model significantly improves performance and efficiency. On a network intrusion IoT dataset covering multiple attack scenarios, it achieved 0.908 accuracy, reduced learning loss to 0.00156, and outperformed existing approaches.