Trust-based Cooperative Game Model for Secure Collaboration in the Internet of Vehicles

The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is an emerging computing paradigm that delivers intelligent transportation services. In an IoV system, the legitimacy, reliability, and accuracy of circulating data have a direct impact on decisions and operations, and eventually, public safety and economy. In this paper, we design a decentralized secure collaboration scheme that protects the vehicles in the IoV environment against the attacks on data integrity. First, the trustworthiness of the vehicles is computed based on their experience acquired from direct interactions using a Bayesian inference model. Then, based on the established trust relationships between the vehicles, we present a vehicular coalition formation approach that incorporates a hedonic cooperative game model, which aims at preventing malicious or faulty vehicles from joining benign vehicular collaborative communities. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme is highly resilient to data alteration and corruption attacks. The scheme also demonstrates to be scalable, and will ultimately allow the IoV entities and platform to derive optimal operative decisions on the fly.