A Path-Backtracking-based Trust Management Scheme for VANETs

Trust management is a representative research domain to ensure secure communication and cooperation among entities in Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs). However, vehicles as entities are not always trustworthy because of the openness characteristics of VANETs, such as various malicious participators, and selfish behaviors. In this paper, we propose a Path-Backtracking-based Trust Management Scheme (PBTMS) for VANETs to evaluate the trustworthiness of entities based on the interaction histories (according to previous interaction counts), message path-backtracking (tracking the origin and route of messages), and multi-path analysis (analyzing the likelihood of malicious vehicle presence). Specifically, within the PBTMS framework, the trustworthiness of vehicles is meticulously evaluated. By incorporating both entity trust and path trust metrics, PBTMS computes an aggregate trust value for each vehicle. Extensive simulations demonstrate that PBTMS surpasses other baseline algorithms in accuracy, achieving higher precision in evaluating entity trustworthiness.