An Efficient and Secure Malicious User Detection Scheme Based on Reputation Mechanism for Mobile Crowdsensing VANET

Abstract

With the increasing development of wireless communication technology and Vehicular Ad hoc Network (VANET), as well as the continuous popularization of various sensors, Mobile Crowdsensing (MCS) paradigm has been widely concerned in the field of transportation. As a currently popular data sensing way, it mainly relies on wireless sensing devices to complete large-scale and complex sensing tasks. However, since vehicles are highly mobile in this scenario and the sensing system is open, that is, any vehicle equipped with sensing device can join the system, the credibility of all participating vehicles cannot be guaranteed. In addition, malicious users will upload false data in the sensing system, which makes the sensing data not meet the needs of the sensing tasks and will threaten traffic safety in some serious cases. There are many solutions to the above problems, such as cryptography, incentive mechanism, and reputation mechanisms. Unfortunately, although these schemes guaranteed the credibility of users, they did not give much thought to the reliability of data. In addition, some schemes brought a lot of overhead, some used a centralized server management architecture, and some were not suitable for the scenario of VANET. Therefore, this paper firstly proposes the MCS-VANET architecture-based blockchain, which consists of participating vehicles (PVs), road side units (RSUs), cloud server (CS), and the blockchain (BC), and then designs a malicious user detection scheme composed of three phases. In the data collecting phase, to reduce the data uploading overhead, data aggregation and machine learning technologies are combined by fully considering the historical reputation value of PVs, and the proportion of data uploading is determined based on the historical data quality evaluation result of PVs. In the data quality evaluation phase, a new reputation computational model is proposed to effectively evaluate the sensing data, which contains four indicators: the reputation history of PVs, the data unbiasedness, the leadership of PVs, and the spatial force of PVs. In the reputation updating phase, to achieve the effective change of reputation values, the logistic model function curve is introduced and the result of the reputation updating is stored in the blockchain for security publicity. Finally, on real datasets, the feasibility and effectiveness of our proposed scheme are demonstrated through the experimental simulation and security analysis. Compared with existing schemes, the proposed scheme not only reduces the cost of data uploading but also has better performance.