Trustworthy Event-Information Dissemination in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

In vehicular networks, trustworthiness of exchanged messages is very important since a fake message might incur catastrophic accidents on the road. In this paper, we propose a new scheme to disseminate trustworthy event information while mitigating message modification attack and fake message generation attack. Our scheme attempts to suppress those attacks by exchanging the trust level information of adjacent vehicles and using a two-step procedure. In the first step, each vehicle attempts to determine the trust level, which is referred to as truth-telling probability, of adjacent vehicles. The truth-telling probability is estimated based on the average of opinions of adjacent vehicles, and we apply a new clustering technique to mitigate the effect of malicious vehicles on this estimation by removing their opinions as outliers. Once the truth-telling probability is determined, the trustworthiness of a given message is determined in the second step by applying a modified threshold random walk (TRW) to the opinions of the majority group obtained in the first step. We compare our scheme with other schemes using simulation for several scenarios. The simulation results show that our proposed scheme has a low false decision probability and can efficiently disseminate trustworthy event information to neighboring vehicles in VANET.