Toward VANET utopia: A new privacy preserving trustworthiness management scheme for VANET

In vehicular ad hoc network (VANET), vehicles are connected in a self-organized manner to collect and share various traffic data about the road condition, accidents, traffic congestions, and other related events, This data can be used to improve the driving quality, however VANET vehicles may receive unreliable data broadcasted by malicious vehicles which may result in unsafe driving and accidents. Many schemes were proposed to deal with such unreliable data. A reputation-based scheme is one of the most promising in determining reliability of messages in a timely manner. Dealing with the privacy presents another challenge in VANET, as malicious vehicles must be detected and their reputation is assigned and updated while preserving their privacy. The system must be able to identify the malicious responses by continuously sending evaluation messages. To address these issues, this paper presents a novel reputation-based message evaluation scheme which guarantees the reliability of the messages as well as the privacy of vehicles. The paper presents some analyses results on the robustness of the scheme against plausible attacks.