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 designed for improving the overall driving experience through the exchange of multitude information among vehicles and the infrastructure. Real-time incident report is an important application domain that can leverage the advantage of vehicular networks to greatly improve driving safety. However, given the presence of malicious entities, blindly trusting such incident report (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 V2I communication facilities deployed and managed by central traffic authorities, which can be used to collect vehicle behavior information in a crowd-sourcing fashion 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.