A hybrid trust management model for secure and resource efficient vehicular ad hoc networks

Considerable innovative advancements in vehicular communication have led to the emerging yet promising paradigm of Internet-of-Vehicles, wherein vehicles exchange safety-critical information with minimal delay for ensuring road safety as well as efficacious traffic flows. It is, therefore, indispensable that these safety messages are authentic and reliable, and have originated from a legitimate vehicle. This demands establishing trust among vehicles such that the malicious and dishonest vehicles (and their malicious content) could be flagged and subsequently eliminated from the network. The risk manifolds if a malicious vehicle gets elected as the cluster head of other vehicles thereby compromising the safety of vehicular passengers and pedestrians on the road. Hence, intelligent algorithms should be in place to opt for the trusted and resource efficient cluster heads which could enhance the overall security and efficiency of their respective clusters. To this end, in this paper, we have proposed a scalable hybrid trust model which takes into account a composite metric encompassing the weighted trust score and available resources of each vehicle for identification of multiple malicious vehicles in real-time, and for meeting the stringent performance requirements of vehicular safety applications. Moreover, an optimal role assignment scheme based on the Hungarian algorithm has been proposed for electing the optimal cluster head, proxy cluster head, and followers among the members of a vehicular cluster so as to maximize its overall efficiency. Preliminary simulations have been carried out and are also presented in this paper.