PECTrust: Privacy-Enhanced Cross-Domain Trust Management Framework for IoV

The Internet of Vehicles (IoVs) play a pivotal role in promoting efficient, safe, and sustainable transportation. However, its inherently dynamic and open environment introduces critical challenges in accurately assessing the trustworthiness of participating vehicle nodes, preserving data privacy, and defending against sophisticated cyberattacks, particularly in cross-domain scenarios. To address these challenges, this article proposes PECTrust, a privacy-enhanced collaborative trust management framework designed to perform a secure, resilient, and privacy-aware trust evaluation for vehicle nodes in IoV environments. Specifically, our PECTrust can adaptively modulate the strength of privacy protection based on historical trustworthiness and event criticality. Meanwhile, an event-triggered cross-domain collaboration scheme is established to achieve low-latency and secure trust transfer under emergency conditions; otherwise, the system performs targeted suppression and containment of malicious nodes based on the attack type. Through continuous feedback and real-time parameter optimization, adaptive evolution of the security posture is achieved. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PECTrust provides accurate and timely assessment of vehicles under coordinated attacks, achieving an area under the curve of 0.981 for malicious node detection, outperforming baseline models in F1-scores for attack classification.