Received: 11 September 2019 Revised: 7 October 2019 Accepted: 18 October 2019 DOI: 10.1002/spy2.99 RESEARCH ARTICLE Data provenance and trust establishment in the Internet of Things Mahmoud Elkhodr 1 Belal Alsinglawi 2 1 School of Engineering and Technology, Central Queensland University, Sydney, Australia 2 School of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics, Western Sydney University, Sydney, Australia Correspondence Mahmoud Elkhodr, School of Engineering and Technology, Central Queensland University, Sydney, Australia. Email: m.elkhodr@cqu.edu.au Abstract The Internet of Things (IoT) is a network of heterogeneous networks encom- passing various forms of communications form the current traditional com- munication models to ubiquitous and pervasive machine to machine commu- nications. In such an ever expanding, dynamic, and complex environment, it becomes vital to know the origin or the source of data and whether this data can be trusted or no. This requires not only accurate, secure, and correct data collection processes; but also provisioning of data provenance throughout the life-cycle of an IoT device and the data it produces. To this end, this work intro- duces a provenance-based trust management solution, which provides a trust establishment mechanism amongst communicating devices in the IoT. It pro- vides a way to quantitatively assess the trustworthiness of data supplied by a given IoT device. Thus, providing a novel solution to preserve data provenance of IoT devices. This IoT data provenance solution extends the capabilities of our previously proposed IoT platform known as the IoT-management platform, which aimed at preserving the privacy of users in the IoT. KEYWORDS Internet of Things, data provenance, privacy, trust 1 INTRODUCTION Current advancement and research into the Internet of Things (IoT) has fostered rapidly, which resulted into the penetra- tion of the IoT in many industries. The IoT has been continuously shaping the way we interact with the world around us at homes, work places, on the move, and in all aspects of our daily life. The incessant adoption of IoT in several industries and its rapid evolvement over a very short period of time has been very noticeable in many recent statistics. 1 To put it in perspective, in 2018, industrial products were reported to be one of the major adopters of IoT accounting to a staggering share of 45%. 2 The integration of Cloud and IoT as one platform has contributed significantly towards the rapid growth of IoT in 2018 as well. The major Cloud service providers such as Microsoft Azure and Amazon reported some remarkable growth in revenue from the services that blend IoT and Cloud technologies. This only highlights the massive scale and the impact the IoT is posing on many industries. The IoT extends the interactions between humans and applications to a new dimension of communications via things. Rather than always interacting with the human users, things will be interacting with each other autonomously by performing actions on behalf of the users. This will result in the IoT being pervasive in many areas. A state of the art IoT system is a technology that provides services based on intelligent decisions made from mining and combining the data gathered and sent by various heterogeneous IoT devices. Such a system prevails when it is empowered Security Privacy. 2020;3:e99. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/spy2 © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 1 of 11 https://doi.org/10.1002/spy2.99