Reputation-Based Dissemination of Trustworthy Information in VANETs

With the emergence of new vehicle communication paradigms such as Vehicle-to-Everything, the possibility of providing advanced services to drivers is becoming a reality. The immediate and targeted warning of dangers offers the opportunity to increase driving safety and make optimal use of the road infrastructure. However, communication reliability between vehicles, or worse, passenger safety, may be compromised by vehicles modified to spread false information or create disorder under coordinated malicious groups. Solutions currently adopted in similar scenarios include the use of Reputation Management Systems (RMS), which allow the reliability of received information to be estimated. However, classic centralized RMSs do not fit the distributed and dynamic nature of vehicular networks. In this paper, a step is taken towards the design of a fully distributed event detection and dissemination system for VANETs, based on vehicle and data reputation, which does not rely on any fixed communication infrastructure. A new reputation model is proposed to reliably detect events and a new communication protocol is defined to disseminate information among vehicles, based on the population protocol model. The experimental evaluation performed on realistic vehicle routes demonstrates the feasibility of the proposed system and its ability to withstand orchestrated attacks, with a significant performance improvement over other state-of-the-art solutions.