Trust Management Model for Secure Internet of Vehicles

Trust Management Model for Secure Internet of Vehicles: History

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Contributor:

Wenbo Ruan

Jia Liu

Yuanfang Chen

Sardar M. N. Islam

Muhammad Alam

The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) enables vehicles to share data that help vehicles perceive the surrounding environment. However, vehicles can spread false information to other IoV nodes; this incorrect information misleads vehicles and causes confusion in traffic, therefore, a vehicular trust model is needed to check the trustworthiness of the message.

Internet of Vehicles
blockchain
trust management

Introduction

With the popularity of 5G and 6G ^[1] and the application of programmable V2X environments and blockchain-based V2X (vehicle to everything) technologies ^[2], the IoV has embraced rapid development. In IoV, vehicles can share their perceived information with other nodes, including traffic safety information, weather information, road information, etc., and obtain services from other nodes ^[3], thus, improving traffic safety and efficiency.

However, vehicles can be unreliable, and we need to solve the problems of how to evaluate the reliability of the message sent by the vehicle and quantify an evaluation measure ^[4] (i.e., trust value) based on the historical behavior of the vehicle before utilizing IoV. For example, in IoV, vehicles may be controlled by attackers to spread false information for selfish reasons, thus, leading to false environmental perception and driving decision-making and thus, endangering the safety of drivers and causing serious traffic accidents ^[5].

In IoV, the basic principle behind the trust model is to ensure the reliable transmission of data by identifying and canceling malicious vehicles and the false news generated by them ^[6]. The trust management mechanism can help vehicles calculate the credibility of received messages ^[7] to improve the accuracy of vehicles in decision-making. In summary, the existing trust management mechanisms can be generally divided into centralized trust management and distributed trust management ^[8]. Centralized trust management has problems such as single points of failure, while distributed trust management has problems such as the delayed update of trust value.

Blockchain, as bitcoin’s core technology, is a distributed ledger ^[9]. Due to its decentralized and immutable characteristics, blockchain can record and update vehicles’ trust values. With blockchain, even if a small number of RSUs have storage errors or are controlled by attackers, the consensus results of the entire network can still be protected. Therefore, some researchers combine blockchain with trust management mechanisms to solve the above problems of centralized and distributed trust management.

However, there are still some problems in the research of trust management mechanisms based on the blockchain or single-layer blockchain. First of all, the vehicles need to store a complete blockchain ledger or send a request to the adjacent full node for verification every time the transaction is verified, which will undoubtedly increase the burden of the vehicle and waste the vehicle’s resources. Secondly, because the number of blockchain nodes is very large and the coverage is active and wide, it is also difficult to conduct hierarchical management according to objective factors such as geographical location, communication traffic, and node density. Finally, because the importance of vehicle data is not the same, the data storage and data sharing between vehicles and RSUs is inefficient if the system does not distinguish the importance of messages. Therefore, how to enable the system to store and share data of different levels of importance is a problem.

Trust Management Mechanism of Double-Layer Blockchain

Consider a scenario where vehicle A needs to know about the traffic and business situation on street A. Vehicle A sends a request to the nearby RSU (we assume that each vehicle is equipped with an Onboard Unit (OBU), which uses Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) or Cellular-V2X (C-V2X) communication technology for micro-wave communication with the RSU). Upon receiving the request, the RSU queries the trust value of vehicle A and allows vehicle A to use the service if its trust value is above a certain threshold. RSU queries relevant data in the RSU blockchain and returns it to vehicle A through a secure transmission channel. Vehicle A can then fully understand the situation of the front area according to the data returned by RSU and the data in its own vehicle blockchain.

However, vehicles and RSUs can both become malicious nodes and act maliciously, affecting other nodes in the system. For example, malicious RSUs may tamper with vehicle trust values, and malicious vehicles may send false messages. To solve the problem of malicious nodes, we propose a trust management mechanism based on the double-layer blockchain. This mechanism is divided into three parts. Of which, the first part is the double-layer blockchain, the second part is the system architecture, and the last part is the consensus mechanism. We introduce the proposed double-layer blockchain trust management mechanism through these three parts.

In this paper, we propose a double-layer blockchain-based trust management mechanism DLBTM to solve the malicious attacks targeted on the communication among vehicles and RSUs in IoV. Using the double-layer blockchain, we can reduce the burden of vehicles in IoV, realize hierarchical management of nodes in IoV, protect vehicular privacy, implement hierarchical data storage and sharing, and realize effective trust evaluation and management of vehicle nodes. Remarkably, our message classification on type algorithm and message evaluator selection algorithm has lower time complexity compared with similar algorithms, and simulation experiments show that our trust management mechanism can effectively identify malicious nodes. Therefore, our DLBTM is effective and feasible in complex IoV environments. For future research, we will introduce an incentive mechanism into our model to promote cooperative behavior.

Highlights of the paper:

Proposes a double-layer blockchain structure that allows selective data storage based on message importance, reducing storage pressure.
Uses logistic regression algorithms to compute vehicle node trust values, accurately judging good and bad nodes.
Employs advanced consensus mechanisms like Ouroboros to make the system secure and reliable.
Tested through simulations, can effectively identify over 90% of malicious nodes under various conditions.
Compared to existing algorithms, this method has lower time and space complexity.

This entry is adapted from the peer-reviewed paper 10.3390/s23104699

References

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