A security authentication method based on trust evaluation in VANETs

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have a high degree of openness. Therefore, if a new vehicle node wants to access the network, we need to validate the vehicle node carefully to ensure the security of the entire networking. There are a large number of vehicle nodes, and the strange degree among the nodes is very high in VANETs. In addition, VANETs are human-oriented networks. All vehicle nodes in the VANET have the right to decide whether to accept a new node. To attack this challenge, this paper proposes a security authentication method based on trust evaluation. The security authentication method consists of two parts: secure authentication based on direct trust evaluation and secure authentication based on indirect trust evaluation. In the direct trust evaluation, the security vector model is established based on the security behaviors of the new vehicle node. The historical security evaluation from the authority units (AU) is collected to calculate the final direct trust. In the indirect trust evaluation, the trust degree is calculated based on the recommendation trust vectors from the vehicle nodes in the network. The method employs correlation coefficient for distinguishing the malicious vehicle. Then, the recommendations from the malicious vehicle nodes are removed. The final recommended trust is gained by calculating the average recommendation trusts of remained vehicle nodes. Simulation results show the advantage of our proposed method.