Abstract
Securing communication in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) is hampered by numerous constraints, making it more difficult. First, traditional security schemes cannot be directly applied in VANET because they consider fixed topology. Second, VANET enables dynamic spectrum access where nodes constantly change frequencies due to their high degree of mobility, resulting in severe consequences on network performance. Third, an effective security scheme in VANET needs local and continual knowledge of nodes. Last, the presence of malicious nodes and their misbehaving activities impair the safety of the drivers since they might alter the content of the sent safety alerts. With these constraints in mind, this paper presents a unique security strategy that utilizes node behaviour during message exchange as a security metric to address these issues. Through the message alert exchange phase, node behaviour is measured through the fuzzy logic framework to generate a rank for each node called trust level (BL), which describes the node's reliability in exchanging safety messages correctly. Moreover, all messages in VANET are encrypted using the existing cryptography techniques. The proposed scheme is developed to enhance communication security in VANET, minimize the effects of malicious nodes, and improve resource utilization in VANET. Evaluation of the proposed scheme shows that it improves the performance of VANET in terms of end-to-end delay, packet delivery ratio, and packet loss ratio. According to the results, our scheme improves throughput by up to 23% and reduces end-to-end delay by up to 60%.