A SCENARIO-BASED TRUST MANAGEMENT APPROACH WITH 3R MESSAGE CATEGORIZATION IN VANETS

Abstract

With the recent advancements in vehicular communications, there has been tremendous growth in the applications supported by Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs). To realize the primary objective of the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS), the growth and development of VANETs in vehicular communications has been eyed as a preeminent advancement by distinguishing itself from the existing technologies with respect to its unique and stringent characteristics. On the one hand, these distinctive characteristics enhance the application of VANETs in various road-related services. However, on the other hand, they pose tremendous security risks due to the presence and possibility of potential cyber threats. Besides many potential solutions that have been implemented to address the security and privacy issues, trust management has positioned itself as a promising advancement in the last few years. However, the development of trust management is still in its early stages. But the focus is narrowed in demonstrating the intricate details involved in a trust management scheme. A Scenario-based Trust management Approach with 3R message categorization (STAR) for VANETs is proposed in this thesis to address the above issue. STAR implements a trust management scheme with three main objectives. Firstly, a 3-type classification of messages, namely refresh, rush, and revoke, introduces a modular approach to reduce overhead issues on the computational units. Secondly, a scenario-based approach is demonstrated, which details five scenarios involved in performing trust computations. Finally, an efficient and secure model is implemented, limiting one of the prominent security threats, Man-in-the-Middle (MiTM) attack. STAR has been implemented on Network simulator2 (NS2) with the integration of Simulation of Urban Mobility (SUMO) for simulating the traffic environment. On various simulation runs, the proposed model is compared with existing Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing technology and reference-list trust management scheme and then validated based on various performance metrics such as delay, throughput, detection accuracy, and packet delivery ratio.