A Novel Multifaceted Trust Management Framework for Vehicular Networks

Maintaining interconnectivity between dynamic vehicular nodes and ensuring trust in vehicular networking is still a challenging issue. It is crucial for the vehicular environments to maintain a stable interconnectivity between the vehicular nodes and further to prevent the vehicular nodes from broadcasting fake messages and simultaneously protect the vehicles against tracking attacks. An efficient Trust Management System (TMS) is proposed in this paper that will ensure trustworthiness and stable interconnectivity between vehicular entities to assure road safety and reliable communication. The proposed approach incorporates a novel timestamp mechanism and block chain concepts to ensure the steady inter-connectivity between the dynamic vehicular nodes. Further, the framework leverages block chain concepts to verify the correctness of the events stored in the Road Side Units (RSUs). It also proposes a versatile hybrid trust model that uses innovative direct and recommended trust evaluation techniques to compute trust between the vehicular entities. Moreover, the framework integrates a threading mechanism to schedule message execution in direct trust evaluation, and clustering techniques to group similar messages in indirect trust evaluation. Various experimental and comparative analyses with other related studies are carried out in a simulated environment to evaluate the performance of the proposed hybrid trust model. The findings show that the proposed trust model produces an accuracy of 92% in identifying malicious nodes.