Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing 151 (2021) 61–69

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J. Parallel Distrib. Comput.

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jpdc

Behavior analysis and blockchain based trust management in VANETs✩

∗
Han Liu, Dezhi Han , Dun Li
Shanghai Maritime University, College of Information Engineering, China

article info a b s t r a c t

Article history: The development of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) is facing great challenges. Due to the open
Received 26 August 2020 environment in VANETs, the false information sent by malicious vehicles not only affects the fairness
Received in revised form 13 December 2020 of information interaction but also seriously threatens the driving safety of normal vehicles. Therefore,
Accepted 4 February 2021
the study of trust evaluation and management in VANETs has become hot topics in recent years. In
Available online 15 February 2021
this paper, we propose a trust management model of VANETs based on blockchain. In this model, a
Keywords: hidden markov model (HMM) based vehicle trust evaluation method that improve the accuracy on
Blockchain the detection of malicious behavior is proposed. Besides, a trust management method based on the
VANETs alliance chain is designed, which greatly improves the efficiency of trust updating and querying on
Trust management the premise of security. Simulation results show that the model is promising and feasible, effective in
Behavior analysis the aspects of trust evaluation and trust management.
© 2021 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
With the development of IoT and the progress of wireless
communication technology, vehicles establish diverse types of
VANETs by DSRC [2]. It provides three kinds of services for ve-
hicles: driving safety, traffic efficiency, and information enter-
tainment [18], in which significantly improves the driving ex-
perience of users and becomes an essential part of the smart
city. Unfortunately, vehicles cannot support mass data storage
and large-scale data sharing under the limitation of comput-
ing and energy, so therefore, VANETs transfer computing tasks
to Roadside Units (RSUs) to alleviate the workload and storage
through edge technologies. The RSUs are a number of servers
with strong computing and processing capabilities in roadside,
which can take the computing tasks for vehicles and assist them
transfer information efficiently. RSUs play essential role in dealing
with massive vehicle data, as it provides application services for
vehicles, shares the calculation work of vehicles, and supports the
efficient and reliable communication among vehicles [22].
Vehicles in VANETs compete with each other for lanes, pas-
sengers, traffic light resources, and other facilities or resources.
Nevertheless, there may have some dishonest vehicles in the net-
work that seek personal benefits by tracking information about
other vehicles and broadcasting them fake information, and any
third party may initiate dishonest action due to the openness of
✩ This document is supported by NSFC under Grant 61672338 and Grant
61873160.
∗ Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: liuhanshmtu@163.com (H. Liu), dzhan@shmtu.edu.cn
(D. Han).
VANETs. Besides, RSUs are semi-credible, since they are usually
distributed around the roadside, the lack of reliable security mea-
sures makes it easy for attackers to hijack them. Therefore, the
way how to effectively evaluate and manage the trust between
vehicle and RSU is an essential problem that should be resolved.
Generally, by collecting and analyzing the historical behavior
of messages sent by vehicles, the change of trust in vehicles is
evaluated, and its credibility is calculated. Vehicle behavior can
be divided into two types, positive and negative. The positive
behavior can increase the credibility value, while negative behav-
ior can reduce the credibility value. The added value is generally
less than the reduced value to punish the negative behavior. In
most cases, trust is maintained by a trusted third-party inter-
mediary, but there is a single point of failure in this way, as
well as low scalability and throughput with it. In order to solve
the problems of centralized service, some researches use RSU to
manage trust. However, RSUs are usually located in unreliable
environments, they are easy to be hijacked. It will cause troubles
such as inconsistent information and untrustworthy services in
trust management services. Moreover, RSUs cannot effectively
evaluate each other’s trust, resulting in huge cost of data sharing.
Blockchain is a public distributed ledger proposed in 2008
[16]. It ensures data privacy through asymmetric encryption, and
uses consistency algorithms such as PoW to maintain data con-
sistency. The remarkable features of the blockchain make it ideal
to build a trust model in VANETs [1]. With the deployment of the
blockchain to the RSU, the behavior of vehicle broadcasting and
the activity record of RSU are recorded in the non-repudiation
ledger of the blockchain. That is, each entity in the network
can verify and audit the transaction in the ledger. Even if the

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpdc.2021.02.011
0743-7315/© 2021 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
H. Liu, D. Han and D. Li
RSU is invaded and its data is tampered with, the integrity and
correctness of entire dataset will not be affected.
Based on the above considerations, it is proposed in this paper
a design of a trust management model for VANETs based on
alliance blockchain. The main contributions are as follows:
(1) We analyze the issues associated to the problem stated,
and put forward the system model, attack model, and
assumptions of the VANETs, as also theoretical supports,
(2) We propose a vehicle trust evaluation algorithm based on
the HMM model applied to the vehicle trust evaluation on
the RSU network. Such an algorithm has higher accuracy
than previous design and has better application value in the
current environment of extreme computing performance,
(3) We propose a trust management method based on Hyper-
ledger Fabric and then applies smart contract to trust value
query and updates, which improves the overall efficiency of
the trust management and ensures better security.
The remaining of this paper is organized as follows. In Sec-
tion 2, related works are presented, while the problem definition
and model design are depicted in Section 3. The HMM-based
vehicle trust evaluation method and alliance chain based trust
management method are presented in Section 4, the comparison
and analysis of the experimental results are shown in Section 5,
and finally, concluding remarks and future directions of this paper
in Section 6.
2. Related work
Existing authentication schemes based on the public key in-
frastructure (PKI) system can provide a relatively safe guarantee
for the VANETs, although it can still be further improved in
terms of efficiency, balance of safety, and performance. Partic-
ularly, the traditional centralized service mode has two short-
comings, which are single-point failure and flow bottleneck. On
the other hand, there is one contradiction between the anony-
mous communication of vehicles and the supervision of malicious
nodes.
In the field of VANETs, trust management, limited vehicle
privacy, and malicious node detection are hot research topics. The
continuous development of blockchain technology brings new
ideas to distributed data storage and management, as it is an
effective method to solve the aforementioned problems.
A. Patel et al. [15] proposed a data transmission scheme called
Vehicle Chain that combines blockchain with elliptic curve cryp-
tography (ECC) to improve the security level of VANETs without
increasing the computing cost. With the distributed characteris-
tics of blockchain, it replaced the trust agent (TA) of VANETs with
the cluster of authorization servers (AS), to overcome the limita-
tions of single point fault for TA. According to J. Kang et al. [4],
the RSU cannot be fully trusted as a vehicle edge computing
server, and the attack or hijacking of a RSU will cause serious
security and privacy challenges to the platform. Thus, this paper
applies alliance blockchain and smart contract technologies to
data storage and sharing in vehicle Edge networks to improve
security. It also proposed a threeweight subjective logic model to
precisely manage the trust degree of vehicles, and demonstrate
its high efficiency in vector data sharing through experiments.
W. Liang et al. [7–10] proposed a DRL-based virtual IP detection
algorithm and a deep reinforcement learning based algorithms
to ensure the security and circuit copyright of IoT hardware. Z.
Yang et al. [22] proposed a distributed vehicle network trust man-
agement system based on the blockchain technology in which
vehicles used the Bayesian reasoning model to verify the infor-
mation received from adjacent vehicles and generating ratings
next, then uploading it to the RSU. Q. Feng et al. [3] proposed
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Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing 151 (2021) 61–69
an efficient and scalable blockchain assisted privacy protection
authentication system (BPAS) based on the Hyperledger Fabric
platform that provides automatic authentication in VANETs, pro-
tect the vehicle privacy, and allow the conditional tracking and
effective revocation for misbehaving vehicles. Z. Lu et al. [13,
14] proposed a blockchain-based anonymous reputation system
(BARS) to establish the privacy protection model of VANETs.
It used the public key as a pseudonym in communication and
used a reputation evaluation algorithm based on direct historical
interaction and indirect evaluation of vehicles to prevent the
spread of forged information. Besides, it used Merkle Patricia Tree
(MPT) to extend the blockchain structure, encrypted and stored
the corresponding relationship between the certificate and the
real identity in the tree, which can only be decrypted in cases of
dispute, thus conditional privacy is achieved. In [6,21], the impact
of the node mobility on the consensus algorithm is evaluated, and
a consensus algorithm suitable for VANETs is proposed to solve
the speed and efficiency problem for the PoW or PoS consensus
algorithm on the public chain.
The application of blockchain in the mutual authentication
mechanism between vehicle and RSU are presented in [5,17,23],
maintaining the anonymity of vehicles and preventing RSU from
being tampered with. Some of recent researches were inspired
by the incentive mechanism in Bitcoin and attempted to issue
’energy currency’ and ’information currency’ in VANETs to boost
information exchange and energy sharing between vehicles as
well as between vehicles and RSUs [12,19].
The above research provides an effective solution and refer-
ence for trust management in VANETs. However, there are still
some deficiencies or defects in these studies. Firstly, most of
these studies use probability and statistics as trust evaluation
methods, which need to be improved in efficiency and accu-
racy. Secondly, most of these systems use public chain as the
technology selection of blockchain. However, as we all know,
the public chain has great defects in consensus efficiency and
throughput performance. In the Internet of vehicles, the com-
munication between vehicles is more and more frequent, and
the amount of data is huge, which requires high timeliness of
transmission. The traditional public chain is generally based on
the consensus algorithm such as PoW and PoS, which sacrifice
performance in order to ensure making consensus. In addition,
most of the trust evaluation models proposed in the above works
are based on simple statistical models, in which the predicted
results are often quite different from the actual results. In the real
environment, due to the malicious behavior of vehicles, the basic
assumptions of these models cannot be established. Therefore,
there are still great challenges in the application of public chain in
the trust management of VANETs. In this paper, we build a HMM-
based model according to the historical behavior of vehicles,
which can detect abnormal behavior and realize the evaluation of
trust. Besides, a trust management system based on the alliance
chain is proposed, which has great advantages in throughput and
efficiency than the traditional public chain.
3. Definition and model design
In this section, it is defined and analyzed the trust-related
problems of VANETs, and then design and build models overcom-
ing the issues encountered.
3.1. System model
The system model proposed and designed is composed of
three layers: Vehicular Network Layer, Edge-Blockchain Layer,
and CA Layer, as shown in Fig. 1. Each of these layers will be
discussed separately below.
H. Liu, D. Han and D. Li
Fig. 1. System Model in VANETs.
Vehicular Network Layer: As the perception and application
layer of the VANETs, vehicles play dual roles — as producer
and consumer, and continuously collect external factors as road
conditions, traffic accidents, and other information that may in-
fluence the motion of a vehicle, then broadcast them to the
neighbor vehicles or RSUs. Concurrently, each vehicle receives
information from other vehicles or RSUs, making and returning
with response actions.
MSG
VehicleA ⇐⇒ VehicleB (1)
MSG
Vehicle ⇐⇒ RSU (2)
Edge-Blockchain Layer: RSU relies on Edge computing ser-
vices and acts as a blockchain implementation layer (EB). In this
paper, an alliance chain is proposed to select and make use of
blockchain technology and the reasons are threefold. First, RSU
belongs to different operators, so blockchain needs to support
organization crossing. Next, RSUs are not open to the public, and
only authorized RSUs can join the network. As the latter one, the
alliance chain’s efficiency is much higher than the public chain,
which can meet the basic throughput needs of VANETs.
In this layer, RSU verifies the messages broadcast by vehicles,
evaluates the trust by analyzing the historical behavior of vehi-
cles, and stores their trust values in the blockchain. As the peer
node in the blockchain, RSU can store complete data copies as
redundant backups of other RSUs. Even if a part of the RSUs is
hijacked or down, the data’s consistency cannot be changed.
EB = {RSU1 , RSU2 , . . . , RSU3 } (3)
endorse endorse endorse
RSU1 ↔ RSU2 ↔ ... ↔ RSUn (4)
CA Layer: As a trusted organization, Certificate Authority (CA)
is mainly used to issue certificates and private keys for RSU,
store public keys and provide authentication services for other
entities. CA is strictly protected, ensuring reliable serviceability.
CA only provides authorization service for RSUs when they join
the network, so even if it has a single point of failure, it will not
cause serious impact on the system. In addition, CA receives strict
protection and monitoring, once it fails, which can be recovered
in a short time. In the actual distributed system, CA can be backed
up by multiple computers.
Sign PK &Certs
Vehicle ⇀
↽ CA → RSU (5)
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Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing 151 (2021) 61–69
3.2. Attack model
Based on the brief analysis of the first section, there may
happen potential malicious behavior in both vehicles and RSU
in VANETs. Vehicles can send fake messages to neighbor nodes
and RSUs to compete for resources, or attacked by hackers than
do that actively. The malicious behavior of RSU is usually due
to illegal hijacking by hackers, which will lead to the disclosure
of user privacy data and the tampering of vehicle information.
Specific analysis of malicious behaviors of vehicles and RSUs
follows next.
Malicious Vehicle: The malicious behavior of vehicles is ex-
tremely harmful. Without supervision and punishment, once
some of vehicles in the system acquire the advantage of infor-
mation or road resources through deception, other vehicles will
follow this behavior. This paper attributes the malicious behavior
of vehicles to two types of attacks.
(a) message spoofing attack: For self-interest, the attacker may
deliberately broadcast false information to occupy more traffic
and information resources. For example, a malicious vehicle may
deliberately broadcast a red light message to seize a lane when
passing a green light intersection. Besides, attackers may broad-
cast harmful messages to disrupt traffic order and threaten the
safety of other vehicles.
broadcast
Vehicle −→ {MSGfake |MSGdanger } (6)
(b) reject cooperative attack: All the vehicles participating in
the VANETs intend to retrieve more information, but they tend
to broadcast less information collected by themselves due to the
consideration of fuel consumption, flow, battery, and other costs.
This kind of behavior will damage the fairness in VANETs. (b)
reject cooperative attack: All the vehicles participating in the
VANETs intend to retrieve more information, but they tend to
broadcast less information collected by themselves due to the
consideration of fuel consumption, flow, battery, and other costs.
This kind of behavior will damage the fairness in VANETs.
Receiv e{MSGoutside } >> Prov ide{MSGown } (7)
Malicious RSU: RSU is located along the road and in a complex
and changeable environment, which results in limited protection
by network operators. Because of this unavoidable risk, RSU is
considered to be semi-credible. Once the RSU is intruded, the
attacker can tamper with and delete the privacy data stored in
it. In this paper, the malicious behavior of RSU is classified into
two types of attacks.
(a) Denial of service attack: The hijacked RSU cannot provide
normal services.
Rate(RSUAv ailability ) << 100% (8)
(b) Data consistency attack: Attackers tamper with and delete
the local data of RSUs, which leads to data inconsistency between
different RSUs.
DataRSU1 {...} ̸ = DataRSU2 {...} (9)
3.3. Assumptions
In order to realize the system model proposed above, this
paper puts forward the following 4 assumptions according to the
actual situation and general experience.
Assumption 1. Because the attacker’s ability is not enough to
control the whole RSU cluster (less than 50%), the possibility of
a large-scale intrusion of RSU is very low. In addition, due to the
regular security inspection of network operators, hijacked RSUs
can be found and recovered in time. Based on these facts, it is
H. Liu, D. Han and D. Li Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing 151 (2021) 61–69

assumed that an attacker can only invade a small number of

RSUs in a short time. This assumption is a prerequisite for the
successful implementation of blockchain on RSU (the solution of
Byzantine problem).

Assumption 2. The existing PKI encryption system (such as RSA)

cannot be brutally cracked. Assumption 2 is the theoretical guar-
antee of RSU authentication and blockchain data security.

Assumption 3. The computing power of RSU is excessive, and the

memory and storage can be expanded as needed, which is enough
to meet the diverse computing requirements. This assumption Fig. 2. Hidden Markov Model.
eliminates the limitation of RSU on computing performance and
storage space, provides physical support for the proposed model
and method in this paper.

Assumption 4. CA is trusted and well protected. It can store the

certificate and public key of RSU completely. Assumption 4 is a
necessary condition for building alliance blockchain in the RSU
network. The conditions for this assumption have been given in
the previous section.

4. Proposed algorithms

This section describes the theory and algorithm in detail,

which is divided into two parts: trust evaluation and trust stor-
age.
Fig. 3. HMM in trust assessment of VANETs.
4.1. HMM-based trust evaluation algorithm

4.1.1. Hidden Markov model

The HMM is an extension of the markov model. For the markov
model, the given observation sequence can determine the state
transition sequence. However, in practice, given an observation
sequence, it is often impossible to directly determine the se-
quence of state transition (for example, take out small balls of
different colors from each jar, but it is impossible to know the
sequence of jars), in which the process of a state transition is hid-
den. This kind of stochastic process is called the hidden Markov
process, as shown in Fig. 2. HMM has one more sequence than
markov model, and can be expressed as: λ = (I , Q , O, V , A, B, π ).
I = {i1 , i2 , i3 , . . . , iT , iT ∈ Q }, represents state sequence
(hidden). The state sequence is generated by Hidden Markov
random chain, which is not observable. In the above example, it
is the sequence of jars.
Q = {q1 , q2 , q3 , . . . , qN } represents possible states of the
Markov process, N is number of states in the model. It is different
number for the jar in the example.
O = {o1 , o2 , . . . , oT , oT ∈ V } represents observation sequence,
T is the length of sequence. Each state outputs one observation,
and one state can correspond to multiple observations. It is a
sequence of the colors of the ball in the example.
V = {v1 , v2 , v3 , . . . , vM } stands for a set of possible observa-
tions, M is number of observation symbols. In the example, it is
the kind of color that the ball may appear.
A = [aij ]N ×N represents state transition probabilities. aij =
P(qj at t + 1|qi at t), 1≤i, j≤N represents the probability of tran-
sition from time t + 1 to state Q when time t is in state Q .
B = [bj (k)]N ×M represents observation probability matrix.
bj (k) = P(vk |j), 1≤k≤M , 1≤j≤N indicates the probability of out-
putting the symbol vk in the state j.
π represents initial state distribution.
There are three fundamental problems that we can solve using
HMM.
Problem 1, probability calculation problems. Given the model
λ = (A, B, π ) and a sequence of observations O, find P {O|λ}. In
64
that case, we calculate the probability of observation sequence
according to the given model.
Problem 2, prediction problems. Given the model λ = (A, B, π )
and a sequence of observations O, find Q .
Problem 3, learning (training) problems. Given a sequence of
observations O, the dimensions N and M, find the model λ =
(A, B, π ) that maximizes the probability of O.
4.1.2. HMM-based trust evaluation algorithm
Inspired by HMM, we propose a HMM-based trust evaluation
algorithm, which combines the behavior of sending messages by
vehicles with the intrinsic authenticity of messages.
Next, we will consider the issue of vehicle trust assessment in
VANETs, as shown in Fig. 3.
Vehicle continuously collect traffic accidents, road conditions
and other information in the process of driving, and broadcast it
to the neighbor vehicle or RSUs. We use the category of events in
the message as observation set Oi . All event categories form the
status set V . The authenticity of information is the hidden value.
Here, we use a set of discrete values [−k, +k] as Q . The history
of messages sent by the vehicle can be used as O. According
to the practical experience, the behavior of vehicles is regular,
honest, and positive in most cases. The description of Trust-HMM
is shown in Table 1.
Based on the above analysis, we can establish a HMM-based
vehicle trust evaluation method. This algorithm has the following
4 main steps, as shown in Fig. 4.
Step 1: This step is the initialization phase, the RSU will set
the initial parameters for the vehicle. RSU sets the trust value to
the initial value of 100 for the vehicle. The HMM-based model
parameters are also set to initial values.
VTi ← 100 (10)
Step 2: Vehicles sent msg to RSU. Then, the RSU collects the
history of messages sent by each vehicle. Messages are divided
H. Liu, D. Han and D. Li Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing 151 (2021) 61–69

Table 1
Description of Trust-HMM.
Symbol Description
I Behavior history of vehicles sending message.
Q Authenticity of message.
The hidden value, ∈ [−k, +k].
V Event category:
Accident, Communication, Multimedia.
The value of observations, ∈ {1, 2, 3}.
O Message history, the observation set.
Stands for the behavior of vehicles.
A State of behavior transition probabilities, need
training.
B Observation probability matrix, need training.
≈ Initial state distribution, need training.

into three classes according to the event category: traffic accident,

communication and multimedia. According to the problem3 in
HMM, the RSU trains the vehicle’s trust assessment HMM model
through the event category history. Here we use unsupervised
learning method to train the model, because the behavior of the
vehicle is not marked in advance.
RSU train
MSG −→ History −→ HMM (11)

Step 3: When the model tends to be stable, the hidden value

of the new message is calculated according to problem 2, then
iterate the model use this message.

q ← HMM(MSGnew ) (12)

Step 4: RSU uses the hidden value to update the trust value,
then write it to blockchain system. This step needs to interact
with the blockchain. Once trust value of the vehicle is written
into the database, all the update operations will be written into
the ledger and cannot be tampered with. Fig. 4. Steps of HMM-based vehicle trust evaluation method.

VTi ← VTi + q (13)

The trust threshold coefficient is k, 0 < k < 1:
1, VT ≥ k · 100
{
isTrust =
0, VT < k · 100
When the RSU finds that isTrust = 0 (standards for untrustwor-
thy), the vehicle will be warned or punished.
4.2. Hyperledger based trust storage
Hyperledger Fabric is an open source project supported by
Linux foundation, which aims to provide a modular platform for
blockchain solutions. It has the following advantages.
(1) Alliance chain, with complete authority control, members
can only join the network by authentication, with good data
sharing and privacy protection.
(2) Modular design, consensus mechanism and encryption
algorithm are pluggable.
(3) Container technology, each node and chain code runs in
the docker, as a result, the environment between containers is
isolated, that ensures the security of the smart contract to the
greatest extent.
In short, it overcomes the shortcomings of public chain, such
as low throughput, low consensus efficiency and easy branching.
RSU can store privacy information, and keep a complete copy
of other RSUs by blockchain. When some RSUs halt, other RSUs
can provide services as backup immediately. In addition, the RSUs
in the system endorse each other. Even if there are hijacked RSUs
tampering with local data, the data security of the whole network
cannot be affected. Other RSUs can also verify the authentic-
ity of the message through the hash traceability feature of the
(14) blockchain. The system can generate multiple pseudonyms for the
vehicle and store their corresponding relationship with the real ID
into the blockchain to protect the privacy of the vehicle.
In this paper, all RSUs are regarded as peer nodes to build a
blockchain network to jointly maintain blockchain data. RSUs of
different operators can be divided into different channels (chan-
nel is a special concept in hyperledger, in the alliance chain,
each channel maintains an independent ledger, and channels are
isolated from each other).
Channeln ← {RSU1 , RSU2 , . . . , RSUm} (15)
There are three types of data to be stored in the blockchain
system. The first is the relationship between vehicle’s real ID and
pseudonym.
Data1 = ({pse1 , pse2 , . . . , psek }, ID) (16)
The second is the history messages of vehicle.
Data2 = (ID, {VH1 , VH2 , . . . , VHn }) (17)
The third is the vehicle’s trust value.
Data3 = (ID, VT ) (18)
Data in Hyperledger Fabric can be modified by using chaincode
transactions, it provides the ability to query or update data. As
shown in Fig. 5.
Unlike bitcoin transactions in blocks, data in Hyperledger Fab-
ric is not linked to each other directly by chains, but stored in
65
H. Liu, D. Han and D. Li Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing 151 (2021) 61–69

Algorithm 1 Query Vehicle’s Trust Value.

Input: ID
Output: VT or Error
1: @implement SmartContractInterface
2: while Invoke() do
3: CStub = ChaincodeStub
4: State, err = CStub.GetState(ID)
5: if err != null then
6: return Error(err.Text)
7: else
8: VT = GetVTBy(State)
9: return VT
10: end if
11: end while

Algorithm 2 Add Vehicle’s Trust Value.

Input: ID, VT
Output: OK or Error
1: @implement SmartContractInterface
2: while Invoke() do
3: CStub = ChaincodeStub
4: State, err = CStub.GetState(ID)
5: if err != null then
6: return Error(err)
7: end if
8: err = CStub.PutState(ID,VT)
9: if err != null then
10: return Error(err.Text)
Fig. 5. Data storage in Hyperledger Fabric.
11: else
12: return OK
13: end if
the database as key–value pairs, which state changes are recorded 14: end while
as transactions in a ledger of different channels. In Hyperledger
Fabric, real data is called ‘‘Word State’’ that can be modified,
while all modification records of data are written into the ledger Algorithm 3 Update Vehicle’s Trust Value.
(blockchain), which is immutable. In addition, it puts forward
Input: ID, VTnew
an index for the ledger to speed up the query. Compared with
Output: OK or Error
bitcoin’s single data type (number), data in Hyperledger can
1: @implement SmartContractInterface
be represented in binary, JSON, XML and other forms, which
2: while Invoke() do
makes data more extensible to meet the needs of more business
3: CStub = ChaincodeStub
scenarios.
4: State, err = CStub.GetState(ID)
We use CouchDB (an open-source K-V database) as the
5: if State == null then
blockchain database. The key (K) is the ID of a vehicle, and the
6: return Error(’Vehicle ID Not Exist’)
value (V) is the trust value. All the operations on the trust value,
7: end if
such as querying or modifying, will be recorded as a transaction
8: err = CStub.PutState(ID,VT)
in a block. After a consensus has been reached, the block will be
9: if err != null then
written into the blockchain (ledger).
10: return Error(err.Text)
From the above steps, we can see that there are three main
11: else
operations in interaction with blockchain: add, update and query.
12: return OK
We implements three kinds of APIs with the smart contracts. One
13: end if
is the query function, which can query the vehicle’s trust value
14: end while
according to the vehicle’s pseudonym (ID). The implementation
of the smart contract is shown in Algorithm 1.
query(ID) → VT (19)
5. Experiment and analysis
The other is the add function, which can add the vehicle’s
trust value with the vehicle ID. The implementation of the smart
In order to verify the effectiveness and performance of the
contract is shown in Algorithm 2.
trust management model proposed in this paper, we design two
add(ID) ← VT (20) groups of comparative experiments. The first group is between
our HMM-based and distance-based Bayesian inference algo-
The last is the update function, which can modify the vehicle’s
rithms on VANETs trust evaluation. The second comparison is
trust value according to the vehicle ID. The implementation of the
smart contract is shown in Algorithm 3. between our alliance chain based and public chain based methods
on VANETs trust management. The experimental environments of
update(ID) ← VTnew (21) this paper are shown in Table 2.
66
H. Liu, D. Han and D. Li
Table 2
Hardware and software environment of the experiments.
Type Content
CPU i7 7500u 2.9 GHz
Memory 8G
Hard Disk 256G
OS Mac OS 10.14
docker v19.03
docker-compose v1.24
node v12
golang v1.12
Hyperledger Fabric v1.4.3
Fig. 6. All system nodes in blockchain system.
Fig. 7. Process of AddTrust in TrustContract.
Fig. 8. Process of UpdateTrust in TrustContract.
Fig. 9. Process of QueryTrust in TrustContract.
5.1. Experimental process of blockchain platform
We use an open-source IoT blockchain experimental platform
based on Fabric-iot [11] to do experiments. This project is de-
veloped by the author, which allows users to quickly build an
alliance blockchain with simplest shell scripts. In particular, it
has implemented several smart contracts of access control in IoT
as examples that can be reused. 3-6. The blockchain system we
built mainly includes: 4 peer nodes, 2 CA nodes, 1 order node, 4
CouchDB nodes and 1 client node, as shown in Fig. 6.
We implement the trust management model proposed by
deploying ‘‘TrustContract’’. The calling process and brief steps
of ‘‘TrustContract’’ are shown in Figs. 7–9, detailed description
of these steps are as follows. As shown in Fig. 7, in process of
‘‘AddTrust’’, a trust value will be save to DB according to the ID
of the vehicle as a K-V pair. This action will be written to the block
as a transaction. In general, the default value of 100 is added the
first time. As shown in Fig. 8, in process of ‘‘UpdateTrust’’, the
trust value of a vehicle will be updated according to its ID. If the
value that queried by ID is ‘‘NULL’’, an error is returned. Same
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Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing 151 (2021) 61–69
Fig. 10. Comparison of the accuracy between proposed method and
distance-based Bayesian inference method.
as ‘‘AddTrust’’, this action will also be written to the block. As
shown in Fig. 9, outsider can query the trust value of a vehicle by
‘‘QueryTrust’’ function.
5.2. Comparative experiments of trust evaluation methods
In some existing studies [20,22], the reliabilities of the vehicles
are calculated by Bayesian inference. In their model, the distance
between the vehicle and the receiver is the criterion to evaluate
the authenticity of messages: the farther the distance, the lower
the message credibility, and the closer the distance, the higher
the message credibility. Nevertheless, we believe that this kind of
evaluation method is highly subjective, since vehicles with close
or far distance have equal possibilities for malicious behavior in
reality. We compare the HMM-based method we proposed to the
distance-based Bayesian inference method. In the experiment, 12
groups of simulation data are used to test the two methods, and
their accuracy is calculated. These different groups of data are
randomly generated to simulate the actual situation, so there are
some differences between the data sets, which purpose is to test
the robustness and real effect of the two methods under different
conditions. The comparison results are shown in Fig. 10.
It can be seen from the figure that the method proposed
in this paper performs well and stably on different data sets.
However, the performance of distance-based Bayesian inference
method is unstable, which shows that this kind of model is not
universal. The result just proves our previous judgment that the
behavior of vehicles can reflect the real trust value more, while
the distance-based Bayesian inference has more randomness —
in other words, the method we proposed can adequately reflect
different situations and has a better practical value.
5.3. Comparative experiments of trust management model
Most of the existing blockchain-based trust management sys-
tems in VANETs choose the public chain as the underlying tech-
nology. As we all know, the consensus mechanism selection of
a blockchain will directly affect its throughput. We believe that
the throughput of the public chain cannot meet the vehicle net-
work’s basic requirements. To prove the QoS (Quality of Service)
advantage of our proposed model, we design an experiment that
compares ours with the public chain (represented by the PoW
consensus algorithm). The experiment simulates the time cost of
two blockchain systems to reach consensus on data under the
different number of RSUs ([5, 100]). The experimental results are
shown in Fig. 11.
H. Liu, D. Han and D. Li
Fig. 11. Comparison of the consensus costs between proposed and public chain.
It can be seen from the figure that with the increase in the
number of RSUs, the time consumed by the public chain to
reach a consensus (to the premise of ensuring security) increas-
ing geometrically, while the method we proposed tends to take
less time. It is proved that the trust management model based
on the alliance chain proposed in this paper is more efficient
than the general public chain, which could meet the needs for
corresponding speed in VANETs.
6. Conclusion and future work
To address the issue that the fake information sent by mali-
cious vehicles threatens the fairness of information sharing and
the driving safety of normal vehicles, this paper proposes a trust
management model in VANETs. In this model, a HMM-based
vehicle trust evaluation method is proposed, which improves
the accuracy on the detection of malicious behavior. Besides,
an alliance-based trust management method is designed, and it
greatly improves the efficiency of trust updating and querying on
the premise of security. Simulation results show that the model is
promising and feasible, effective in the aspects of trust evaluation
and trust management.
The future research can focus on the selection and improve-
ment to HMM training model. In addition, testing and training
combined with the data in production environment will make
better results. Finally, blockchain technology is booming, espe-
cially the alliance chain, it is worth updating in time in the
future.
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Han Liu: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Writing -
original draft. Dezhi Han: Validation, Writing - review & editing.
Dun Li: Visualization.
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing finan-
cial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared
to influence the work reported in this paper.
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Han Liu received the M.S. degree from the Shanghai
Maritime University, where he is currently pursuing the
Ph.D. degree. His main research interests include big
data, cloud computing, distributed computing, cloud
security, machine learning, IoT, and blockchain.
H. Liu, D. Han and D. Li
Dezhi Han received the Ph.D. degree from the
Huazhong University of Science and Technology. He is
currently a Professor of computer science and engineer-
ing with Shanghai Maritime University. His research
interests include Cloud computing, Mobile networking,
Wireless communication, and Cloud security.
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Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing 151 (2021) 61–69
Dun Li received the M.S. degree from the Macau
University of science and technology, and he is
currently doing the Ph.D. degree in the Shanghai Mar-
itime University. His main research interests include
Smart Finance, big data, machine learning, IoT, and
blockchain.