A Survey of Security Threats and Trust Management in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

2025-05-25

Transactions on Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence

AI Summary

This study addresses the limitations of traditional security mechanisms in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), which struggle to defend against insider malicious attacks, highlighting the urgent need for efficient and trustworthy trust management solutions. The paper presents a systematic review and classification of existing trust models, uniquely distinguishing between receiver-side and sender-side trust evaluation paradigms. Through comprehensive literature review, taxonomic analysis, and sequence diagram comparisons, the work demonstrates that sender-side mechanisms offer significant advantages in terms of real-time decision-making and reduced computational overhead. By clarifying the respective applicability scenarios of these two approaches, the study not only provides a theoretical foundation for practical deployment but also identifies promising directions for future research in VANET trust management.

Technology Category

• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Representing, Reasoning, and Using Provenance, Trust
• Multiagent Systems: Mechanism Design
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Model-Based Reasoning

Application Category

• Semantics and Knowledge: Provenance, trust, security and privacy, and ethical issues in managing semantic data
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Virtualization and resource management in Web systems and infrastructures
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements

Abstract

This paper presents a survey of state-of-the-art trust models for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs). Trust management plays an essential role in isolating malicious insider attacks in VANETs which traditional security approaches fail to thwart. To this end, many trust models are presented; some of them only address trust management, while others address security and privacy aspects besides trust management. This paper first reviews, classifies, and summarizes state-of-the-art trust models, and then compares their achievements. From this literature survey, our reader will easily identify two broad classes of trust models that exist in literature, differing primarily in their evaluation point. For example, most trust models follow receiver-side trust evaluation and to the best of our knowledge, there is only one trust model for VANETs which evaluates trust at the sender-side unless a dispute arises. In the presence of a dispute, a Roadside Unit (RSU) rules on the validity of an event. In receiver-side trust models, each receiver becomes busy while computing the trust of a sender and its messages upon the messages' arrival. Conversely, in the sender-side class, receivers are free from any kind of computation as the trust is verified at the time the message is announced. Also, vehicles can quickly act on the information, such as taking a detour to an alternate route, as it supports fast decision-making. We provide a comparison between these two evaluation techniques using a sequence diagram. We then conclude the survey by suggesting future work for sender-side evaluation of trust in VANETs. Additionally, the challenges (real-time constraints and efficiency) are emphasized whilst considering the deployment of a trust model in VANETs.

Problem

• Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks
• security threats
• trust management
• malicious insider attacks
• sender-side trust evaluation

Innovation

• trust management
• sender-side evaluation
• VANETs
• receiver-side evaluation
• real-time constraints