A beacon-based trust management system for enhancing user centric location privacy in VANETs

In recent years, more and more researches have been focusing on trust management of vehicle ad-hoc networks (VANETs) for improving the safety of vehicles. However, in these researches, little attention has been paid to the location privacy due to the natural conflict between trust and anonymity, which is the basic protection of privacy. Although traffic safety remains the most crucial issue in VANETs, location privacy can be just as important for drivers, and neither can be ignored. In this paper, we propose a beacon-based trust management system, called BTM, that aims to thwart internal attackers from sending false messages in privacy-enhanced VANETs. To evaluate the reliability and performance of the proposed system, we conducted a set of simulations under alteration attacks, bogus message attacks, and message suppression attacks. The simulation results show that the proposed system is highly resilient to adversarial attacks, whether it is under a fixed silent period or random silent period location privacy-enhancement scheme.