An Innovative Reputation System for Trustworthy and Secure Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communication

Abstract

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) are a promising technology that ensures secure and efficient transportation by allowing vehicles to seamlessly communicate with each other and with infrastructure to share real-time information and make better decisions while travelling. However, determining which information is accurate under certain circumstances, such as in the event of an accident, may become challenging when receiving messages from multiple nearby vehicles. Therefore, trusting these messages requires a reliable and secure system to guard against insider attackers, who may intentionally send misleading information, particularly in scenarios without extensive Roadside Units (RSUs) to mediate these exchanges.

Existing standards, such as the Security Credential Management System (SCMS), supply vehicles with pseudonym certificates to meet security and privacy requirements. However, this system has difficulties ensuring that the revoked certificates are updated in regions with limited connectivity access. In order to solve this issue, this research proposes a novel reputation system to maximize the chance of making an accurate decision based on the received messages. This builds upon existing standards and specifications to integrate an innovative Pre Signature scheme for effective reputation dissemination.

The Pre-Signature scheme enables vehicles to assess dynamically and rely on the most trustworthy information available, even in challenging and limited environments. The research develops realistic simulations of 24-hour rural scenarios to replicate real-time communication challenges. The simulation work also includes accident and malicious attack scenarios, thus giving a wide-ranging performance evaluation of the Pre-Signature scheme under typical infrastructural constraints. The results revealed a significant enhancement in decision-making accuracy with conflicting information, achieving an improvement ranging from 36% in Accidents and 44.4% in No-Accident scenarios in a rural environment compared to the existing certification system.

Finally, a new reporting scheme, Distributed Reputation for Accurate Vehicle Misbehaviour Reporting (DRAMBR), is proposed to improve reporting efficiency in disconnected areas by effectively mitigating false reports while distinguishing between honest reporters, system errors and malicious behaviours. Experimental results indicate that the DRAMBR system achieves 98% effectiveness in distinguishing between behaviours, highlighting its overall performance.

The contribution of the thesis is related to the development of VANETs, in particular, to improve the reliability and efficiency of V2V communications in critical areas, enabling safer, more secure, and efficient transport networks.