A Decentralized Trust Management System for Intelligent Transportation Environments

Commercialized 5G technology will provide reliable and efficient connectivity of motor vehicles that could support the dissemination of information under an intelligent transportation system. However, such service still suffers from risks or threats due to malicious content producers. The traditional public key infrastructure (PKI) cannot restrain such untrusted but legitimate publishers. Therefore, a trust-based service management mechanism is required to secure information dissemination. The issue of how to achieve a trust management model becomes a key problem in the situation. This paper proposes a novel prototype of the decentralized trust management system (DTMS) based on blockchain technologies. Compared with the conventional and centralized trust management system, DTMS adopts a decentralized consensus-based trust evaluation model and a blockchain-based trust storage system, which provide a transparent evaluation procedure and irreversible storage of trust credits. Moreover, the proposed trust model improves blockchain efficiency by only allowing trusted nodes participating in the validation and consensus process. Additionally, the designed system creatively applies a trusted execution environment (TEE) to secure the trust evaluation process together with an incentive model that is used to stimulate more participation and penalize malicious behaviours. Finally, to evaluate our new design prototype, both numerical analysis and practical experiments are implemented for performance evaluation.