RATE: A RSU-Aided Scheme for Data-Centric Trust Establishment in VANETs

In the research area of vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs), a novel notion named data-centric trust establishment is introduced recently, which means the trustworthiness of data is evaluated according to the data's intrinsic properties instead of the reputation of providing entities. In this paper, we propose a Roadside-unit Aided Trust Establishment scheme (RATE) that aims to execute data-centric trust establishment in VANET efficiently1. Compared to existing trust establishment approaches, RATE is completely data-centric, making RATE appropriate for rapidly changing environment. In addition, through the employment of ant colony optimization algorithm, RATE has ability to integrate direct observed data with feedback information when evaluating the trustworthiness of data, eventually improves the accuracy of evaluation result. Lastly, RATE decouples dataconsuming and data-providing entities, thus enables vehicles to mitigate the attacks launched by malicious nodes through directly-linked communications. Simulation shows that RATE can effectively analyze data provided in VANET and correctly establish trust on data.