Trust Management for Software-Defined Heterogeneous Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Over the past few decades, a considerable amount of interest has been observed (in both academia and industry) for improving the overall road transportation across the globe, primarily to enhance the safety of vehicular passengers and vulnerable road pedestrians. Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) are anticipated to play a critical role in smart cities and Internet of Things (IoT) domain. Instead, it is expected that a new paradigm of Internet of Vehicles (IoV) will soon become an important component of the IoT. Also, since the connected vehicles primarily disseminate safety-critical information, it is imperative to have an extremely secure and trusted network so that critical data information (or any other sort of sensory data information) could be traversed with extreme reliability and authenticity. Unlike conventional wired networks, vehicular networks are highly dynamic, distributed and of open nature, and are, therefore, susceptible to various attacks such as replay, spoofing, eavesdropping, man-in-the-middle, distributed denial-of-service, blackhole, grayhole, Sybil and other malware attacks. To address the same, numerous mechanisms have been proposed in the literature, mainly relying on traditional cryptography techniques. Nevertheless, cryptography-based solutions are not effective in VANETs since nodes in this network are highly dynamic and distributed across the network. Moreover, the network infrastructure cannot be guaranteed permanently, and cryptographic solutions may also get compromised due to insider attacks in a network. This chapter aims to provide an in-depth investigation of a diverse range of security attacks challenging the actual realisation of vehicular networks. In contrast to conventional security (cryptography-based) solutions, it brings forth the need for trust management for securing vehicular networks (a concept still in its early stages of development) for ensuring reliability, authenticity and relevance by revoking both malicious and selfish nodes. It also briefly highlights the need for trust models and illustrates the characteristics of data-oriented trust models, entity-oriented trust models and hybrid trust models. Furthermore, since the conventional networks are being transformed via the promising yet emerging notion of software-defined networking (SDN), a brief discussion is presented so as to illustrate how a reconfigurable, reprogrammable and agile infrastructure can help in guaranteeing more secure vehicular networking platforms which are indispensable for futuristic Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) applications and services.