A Blockchain-based Multi-Metric Trust Management Framework for Secure and Scalable Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks

With Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs) now integrated into intelligent transportation systems, obtaining critical security and trust in such environments where vehicles often exchange sensitive information is becoming a challenge. The paper proposes a new best effort blockchain based trust management framework for the real time data integrity, authentication vehicular identities and malicious behaviors detections. Based on the operating manufacturing environment context, a distributed ledger is applied as a trusted method to immutably store trust scores obtained by the multi-metric evaluation, which include message consistency, transmission reliability, location verification, as well as behavioral patterns. Both direct and indirect trust will be calculated in a hybrid trust model that combines both techniques, and consensus mechanisms will be used to screen transactions and trust updates. The performance in terms of detection of malicious nodes, false positives and whole network stability is compared with the conventional trust models using a simulated VANET environment. A set of comprehensive metrics including latency, throughput, trust convergence, as well as packet delivery ratio are presented, rendering the proposed solution feasible and robust.