Evaluating Trust Aware Machine Learning Models for Secure Data Sharing in Distributed Internet of Things and Edge Computing Infrastructures

The rapid growth of Internet of Things (IoT) and edge computing technologies has introduced new security challenges due to the distributed, heterogeneous, and dynamic nature of these environments. Conventional static security mechanisms, such as rulebased authentication and fixed trust models, are often inadequate for addressing evolving threats and abnormal behaviors in largescale IoT systems. To overcome these limitations, this study proposes a machine learningbased trust evaluation framework for enhancing security in distributed IoT environments. The proposed approach dynamically assesses the trustworthiness of IoT nodes by analyzing behavioral and interactionbased features collected at the edge layer. Machine learning models are trained to classify nodes into trusted and malicious categories and continuously update trust values in response to changing network conditions. Based on the predicted trust levels, adaptive security decisions are enforced to allow or restrict node participation in data sharing and computation processes. A quantitative experimental evaluation is conducted using simulated distributed IoT scenarios that include both normal and malicious behaviors. The performance of the proposed framework is evaluated using standard metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, F1score, and detection effectiveness, and is compared against conventional static trust and rulebased security mechanisms. The results demonstrate that the proposed machine learningbased trust evaluation approach achieves significantly higher detection accuracy and robustness while maintaining low computational overhead. Overall, the findings confirm that integrating machine learning into trust management provides an effective and scalable solution for securing distributed IoT systems under dynamic and adversarial conditions.