A dynamic trust evaluation scheme based on cross-domain trust inheritance for VANETs

In vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), vehicles can exchange information with each other or other entities, thus greatly enhancing traffic efficiency and safety. However, in such a situation, some dishonest entities may act maliciously, such as providing false information, misleading other normal vehicles to adopt unsafe behaviors, or even causing traffic accidents. Fortunately, trust evaluation is considered a feasible approach to solve the above problem by filtering malicious or unauthorized nodes based on the trust value assigned to the vehicle. However, due to the high-speed movement of vehicle nodes, it is not easy to update the trust value of a vehicle in real-time during the vehicle authentication process, especially during cross-domain vehicle authentication. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a dynamic trust evaluation scheme with cross-domain trust inheritance for VANETs (CDTE). In CDTE, we design a cross-domain trust inheritance mechanism that can update the trust value of a vehicle in a short period, thus improving the efficiency of trust assessment in high-mobility environments. In addition, an information authenticity assessment method is constructed to further enhance the accuracy of the assessment results in the trust assessment process. The simulation results show that our proposal achieves higher accuracy in detecting malicious vehicles and more efficient trust evaluation compared to existing trust evaluation mechanisms.