The Internet of things (IoT) and advancements of wireless technology have evolved intelligent transport systems to integrate billion of smart objects ready to connect to the Internet. The modern era of the Internet of things (IoT) has brought significant development in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) which transformed the conventional VANET into the Internet of Vehicle (IoV) to improve road safety and diminished road congestion. However, security threats are increasing due to dependency on infrastructure, computing, dynamic nature, and control technologies of VANET. The security threats of VANETs could be addressed comprehensively by increasing trustworthiness on the message received and transmitting node. Conversely, the presence of dishonest vehicles, for instance, Man in the Middle (MiTM) attackers, in the network sharing malicious content could be posed as a severe threat to VANET. Thus, increasing trustworthiness among nodes can lead to increased authenticity, privacy, accuracy, security, and trusted information sharing in the VANET. In this paper, a lightweight trust model is proposed, presented model identifying dishonest nodes and revoking its credential in the MiTM attack scenario. Furthermore, addressing the privacy and security requirement, the pseudonym scheme is used. All nodes in the VANET established trust provided by initially RSU, which is a trusted source in the network. Extensive experiments are conducted based on a variety of network scenarios to evaluate the accuracy and performance of the presented lightweight trust model. In terms of recall, precision, and F-score, our presented model significantly outperformed compared to MARINE. The simulation results have validated that the proposed lightweight model realized a high trust level with 40 of MiTM attackers and in terms of F-score 95, whereas the MARINE model has 90, which leads to the model to attain high detection accuracy.

This paper presents a high-reliability Grouping-Based communications trust model in Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANET). The proposed solution consists of two distinct components: First, the Dynamic Group Head Selection (DGHS) scheme to improve the Group Head’s (GH) stability by considering the reliability of the communication link with the Road Side Unit (RSU). Second, a hybrid Dynamic Trust Model (DTM) scheme improves trustworthiness by considering the node’s dynamic conditions and records. Average GH Lifetime and Average Query Success Rate were used as metrics to evaluate the performance of the grouping algorithms to those of Cluster-Based Location Service (CBLS) and Trust-based Security for Message Exchange (TSME). The proposed DTM was compared to TSME and MiTM Attack Resistant Trust Model (MARINE). With a maximum density of 900 vehicles, DTM improves the average GH lifetime by 43% compared to CBLS and 19% compared to TSME. Similarly, DTM increases the query success rate by 10% compared to the CBLS and 23% compared to the TSME, even at the slowest speed (40 km/h). In terms of node density precision, DTM decreases by around 5% for MARINE and 10% for the TSME approach. In conclusion, it has been shown that the proposed schemes are reliable for various position-based VANET applications that need precise positioning and trusted messaging.