Trustworthy Event-Information Dissemination in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Rakesh Shrestha,Seung Yeob Nam

doi:10.1155/2017/9050787

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.

Highlights

Vehicular networks are expected to be used for traffic control, accident avoidance, parking management, and so on [1]
We mainly focus on V2V communications because road side units (RSUs) [1] may not be available in some parts of the country during the initial stages of deployment of the vehicular communications infrastructure
We introduce an enhanced K-means clustering technique to minimize the effect of malicious nodes on trust level calculation

Summary

Introduction

Vehicular networks are expected to be used for traffic control, accident avoidance, parking management, and so on [1]. One of the major issues in vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is message trust, which can be used to secure VANET communications. We focus on determining the trustworthiness of the event information in the received messages by considering reports from neighboring vehicles differently with a truth-telling probability. (ii) Since all the decisions are made based on the information received from the neighbor vehicles, our proposed scheme can work in an infrastructure-less environment as well. (iii) Our proposed scheme can make a better decision on the trustworthiness of a given message compared to a simple voting mechanism, since the modified threshold random walk (TRW) can give a higher weight on the opinion of a vehicle, which makes more true statements than false statements.

Related Work

System Model

Performance Evaluation

50 Modified TRW