Abstract
Due to inadequate management of Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs), malicious nodes could participate in communications along with misbehavior, e.g., dropping packets and spreading fake information. Therefore, it is essential to detect misbehavior of internal attackers that will cause network performance degradation (e.g., taking longer time to receive messages or reaching destinations with detours). Apart from the capture of dynamic network topology of VANETs, the social relationship among nodes can also be applied as a relatively stable metric to qualify nodes. This paper proposes a misbehavior detection mechanism based on social relationships, from which nodes determine trust for the receiver or transmitter. Based on the proposed mechanism, road traffic control applications can avoid the interference from malicious nodes. The construction of social relationships depends on the geographic information reflected by the movement of nodes, including contact frequency and trajectory similarity, since the geographic information can accurately indicate the relevance among nodes. In addition to the social relationship, the proposed mechanism also evaluates the data trust from time and spatial factors to reduce the interference of fake data. Finally, the proposed mechanism integrates data trust and social relationships to enable misbehavior detection decisions. Extensive results of simulations show that the proposed mechanism has outstanding malicious nodes detection rates under various proportions of malicious nodes and movement patterns.