A Trust Model for Vehicular Network-Based Incident Reports

Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) networks are ephemeral, short-duration wireless networks that have the potential to improve the overall driving experience through the exchange of information between vehicles. V2V and V2I networks operate primarily by distributing real-time incident reports regarding potential traffic problems such as traffic jams, accidents, bad roads and so on to other vehicles in their vicinity over a multi-hop network. However, given the presence of malicious entities, blindly trusting such incident reports (even the one received through a cryptographically secure channel) can lead to undesirable consequences. In this paper, we propose an approach to determine the likelihood of the accuracy of V2V incident reports based on the trustworthiness of the report originator and those vehicles that forward it. The proposed approach takes advantage of existing road-side units (RSU) based V2I communication infrastructure deployed and managed by central traffic authorities, which can be used to collect vehicle behavior information in a crowd-sourcedfashion for constructing a more comprehensive view of vehicle trustworthiness. For validating our scheme, we implemented a V2V/V2I trust simulator by extending an existing V2V simulator with trust management capabilities. Preliminary analysis of the model shows promising results. By combining our trust modeling technique with a threshold-based decision strategy, we observed on average 85% accuracy.