Trust Management Strategy for Digital Twins in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

As an essential part of mobile networks, vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are beneficial to the improvement of traffic efficiency and safety through real-time information sharing between vehicles. Digital Twins (DT) have been utilized to facilitate the design, testing, and deployment of VANETs. However, constructing Digital Twins still faces interference from malicious vehicles. Despite most vehicles following communication rules honestly, the reliability and authenticity of traffic messages cannot be guaranteed due to the network’s openness and vulnerability. Meanwhile, vehicles may suffer tracking attacks during the interaction without an effective privacy-preserving method, leading to the leakage of sensitive data. To address these issues, a decentralized trust management scheme embedded with blockchain that considers identity authentication is proposed to detect malicious DT-vehicles. In our method, each vehicle in the Digital Twin of VANETs (DT-VANETs) is equipped with a certificate recorded on the blockchain as a legal identity, which is also served as a pseudonym for security during message transmission. The trustworthiness of the vehicle is evaluated based on direct trust and recommendation trust. Direct interaction between vehicles consists of message authenticity verification and active detection, which are the basis of direct trust calculation. For other vehicles, these direct trust opinions are treated as second-hand information to obtain recommendation trust. Unreliable recommendations are filtered by our proposed RTF algorithm, further resisting cooperation attacks. Vehicles judged to be malicious will have their certificates revoked and removed from DT-VANETs, providing a guarantee for the establishment of trust in DT-VANETs. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme can effectively resist malicious attacks in DT-VANETs.