BayesTrust and VehicleRank: Constructing an Implicit Web of Trust in VANET

As Vehicular Ad hoc Network (VANET) features random topology and accommodates freely connected nodes, it is important that the cooperation among the nodes exists. This paper proposes a trust model called Implicit Web of Trust in VANET (IWOT-V) to reason out the trustworthiness of vehicles. Such that untrusted nodes can be identified and avoided when we make a decision regarding whom to follow or cooperate with. Furthermore, the performance of Cooperative Intelligent Transport System (C-ITS) applications improves. The idea of IWOT-V is mainly inspired by web page ranking algorithms such as PageRank. Although there does not exist explicit link structure in VANET because of random topology and dynamic connections, social trust relationship among vehicles exists and an implicit web of trust can be derived. To accomplish the derivation, two algorithms are presented, i.e., BayesTrust and VehicleRank. They are responsible for deriving the local and global trust relationships, respectively. The simulation results show that IWOT-V can accurately identify trusted and untrusted nodes if enough local trust information is collected. The performance of IWOT-V affected by five threat models is demonstrated, and the related discussions are also given.