Trust enforcement in vehicular networks: Challenges and opportunities

A major objective of vehicular networking is to improve road safety and travel convenience. The experience of individual vehicles on traffic conditions and travel situations can be shared with other vehicles for improving their route planning and driving decisions. Nevertheless, the frequent occurrence of adversary vehicles in the network is unavoidable. These vehicles may engage in various malicious activities affecting the overall network performance. To control and monitor effectively security threats in vehicular networks, an efficient trust management system should be employed to identify the trustworthiness of individual vehicles and detect malicious drivers. This study provides a review of the research efforts aimed at enabling trust in vehicular environments. The major challenges are highlighted, and an edge-based architecture is proposed as a supportive platform. Furthermore, existing models proposed for trust evaluation, aggregation, propagation and decision making are reviewed. Finally, the current directions to enforce trust in vehicular environments are highlighted.