On the Design, Development and Implementation of Trust Evaluation Mechanism in Vehicular Networks

Vehicular Ad-hoc NETworks (VANET) have revolutionised the intelligent transportation systems. Indeed, they enable vehicles to communicate with each other and with the infrastructure, and they facilitate several vital applications in real-time. Several trust models have been proposed to ensure a secured VANET and the authenticity, integrity and reliability of information exchanged in the network. The concept of trust models is to introduce and implement trust explicitly in the vehicular nodes. In this paper, we propose a lightweight evaluation methodology to evaluate trust models, specifically designed for VANET. Our study focused on the three categories of VANET trust models (TMs): Entity-oriented Trust Models (ETM), Data oriented Trust Models (DTM) and Combined Trust Models (CTM). Our simulations evaluate the efficiency of the trust models and compare them against several trust related parameters: false positive rate, precision and accuracy level in detecting malicious nodes. Since the scope of this research work is to evaluate the performance of TMs under adversary conditions, we have considered on-off attacks which can act as man-in-the-middle to drop and delay transmitted packets.