An Efficient Trust Management System for Balancing the Safety and Location Privacy in VANETs

In VANETs, how to determine the trustworthiness of event messages has received a great deal of attentions in recent years for improving the safety and location privacy of vehicles. Among these research studies, the accuracy and delay of trustworthiness decision are both important problems. In this paper, we propose a road-side unit (RSU) and beacon-based trust management system, called RaBTM, which aims to prorogate message opinions quickly and thwart internal attackers from sending or forwarding forged messages in privacy-enhanced VANETs. To evaluate the performance and efficiency of the proposed system, we conducted a set of simulations under alteration attacks and bogus message attacks with various adversary ratios. The simulation results show that the proposed system RaBTM is highly resilient to adversarial attacks and performs at least 15% better than weighted vote (WV) scheme.