Trust computation in VNs using blockchain

Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VNs) is networks of vehicles that are becoming a potential solution to improve traffic safety and comfort. Vehicles may receive the message and be informed about traffic status when they arrive within the transmission vicinity of the message source or another informed vehicle. Vehicles may send out incorrect messages, so privacy-preserving authentication and trust computation for VNs are a critical task. In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving authentication trust computation scheme using blockchain to ensure the legitimacy of the messages exchanged by vehicles. Specifically, privacy-preserving mutual authentication using infrastructure-aided methods and the Perron–Frobenius theorem for computing trust in the VN environment are presented. In this proposed scheme, vehicles are normal nodes; however, fixed entities (RSUs) of the VNs are mining nodes. We have also used solo miner as a police vehicle, ambulance, and government vehicle to compute the accurate reputation of vehicles and to reduce false message broadcasting. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed mechanism can effectively evaluate the trust of vehicles using a reward and penalty approach. Furthermore, it can preserve privacy through mutual authentication in one transaction with the proof of presence or absence of VNs.