A hybrid trust management framework for vehicular social networks

Abstract

This paper addresses the trust management problem in the emerging Vehicular Social Network (VSN). VSN is an evolutionary integration of Vehicular Ad hoc NETwork (VANET) and Online Social Networks (OSN). The application domain of VSN inherits the features of its parental VANET and OSN, providing value-added services and applications to its consumers, i.e. passengers and drivers. However, the immature infrastructure of VSN is vulnerable to security and privacy threats while information sharing, and hard to realize in the mass of vehicles. Therefore, in this paper, we particularly advocate for communication trust establishment and management during information exchange in VSN. First, we establish functional architectural frameworks for VSN that are based on the underlying applications. Second, based on these frameworks, we propose two trust establishment and management solutions, i.e. email-based social trust and social networks-based trust, to target different sets of applications. Third, we discuss the contemporary research challenges in VSN. Our proposed scheme is a stepping stone towards the secure and trustworthy realization of this technology.