Blockchain-Assisted Trust Management Scheme for Securing VANETs

The main goal of VANETs is to improve the safety of all road users. Therefore, the accuracy and trustworthiness of messages transmitted in VANETs are essential, given that life may rely on them. VANETs are provided with basic security services through the use of public key infrastructure-based authentication. However, the trust of users is still an open issue in VANETs. It is important to prevent bogus message attacks from internal vehicles as well as protect vehicle privacy. In this paper, we propose a trust management scheme that ensures trust in VANETs while maintaining vehicle privacy. The trust scheme establishes trust between vehicles where a trust value is assigned to every vehicle based on its behavior and messages are accepted only from vehicles whose trust value is greater than a threshold, therefore, protecting VANETs from malicious vehicles and eliminating bogus messages. If a traffic event happens, vehicles upload event messages to the reachable roadside unit (RSU). Once the RSU has confirmed that the event happened, it announces the event to vehicles in its vicinity and records it into the blockchain. Using this mechanism, RSUs are prevented from sending fake or unverified event notifications. Simulations are carried out in the context of bogus message attacks to evaluate the trust scheme's reliability and efficiency. The results of the simulation indicate that the proposed scheme outperforms the compared schemes and is highly resistant to bogus message attacks.