Trust On the Security of Wireless Vehicular Ad-hoc Networking

Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) security is one of the central issues in vehicular communications since each vehicle has to rely on messages sent out by the peers where the received message could be malicious. In order to protect VANETs from malicious actions, each vehicle must be able to evaluate, decide and react locally on the information received from other vehicles. In this paper, we analyze probabilistic and deterministic approaches (individually and combined) to estimate trust for VANET security. The probabilistic approach determines the trust level of the peer vehicles based on received information. The trust level is used to determine legitimacy of the message, which is used to decide whether the message would be considered for further transmission over the VANET or dropped. The deterministic approach measures the trust level of the received message by using distances calculated using received signal strength (RSS) and the vehicle's geolocation (position coordinate). Combination of probabilistic and deterministic approach gives better results compared to individual approaches. The proposed algorithms are illustrated with numerical results obtained from simulations.