AIT: An AI-Enabled Trust Management System for Vehicular Networks Using Blockchain Technology

Currently, connected vehicles have gradually stepped into our daily lives, and they generally rely on vehicular networks to generate and exchange traffic-related messages to improve the overall travel safety and efficiency. However, due to the open nature of vehicular networks, these traffic-related messages could be erroneous, which may be caused by various reasons, ranging from an onboard device (OBD) sensor malfunctioning and reporting incorrect reading to the message being tampered by a malicious vehicle. To address these rapidly increasing security challenges, we have proposed an AI-enabled trust management system (AIT) in this article, which is an AI-enabled trust management system for vehicular networks using the blockchain technique. In the AIT system, each vehicle first senses, generates, and exchanges messages with other vehicles. These messages then get validated by the neighboring vehicles. As vehicles receive and validate messages from other nearby vehicles, they will establish and manage the trust of those nearby vehicles, which is enabled by utilizing the deep learning algorithm. Once a vehicle identifies untrustworthy vehicles, it reports them to the nearby roadside unit (RSU), and the RSU will validate the authenticity of the report as well as the identity of the vehicle by using the emerging blockchain technique. The security credentials of untrustworthy vehicles will then be revoked by the RSU. We have conducted an extensive experimental study to evaluate the AIT system. Simulation results clearly indicate that AIT performs better than existing approaches and can manage the trust of vehicles and detect malicious ones in an accurate and efficient manner.