Secure clustering for efficient data dissemination in vehicular cyber–physical systems

• A new secure clustering for efficient data dissemination in vehicular environment is proposed.
• A new secure trust metric is evaluated for cooperation among the nodes.
• Performance of the proposed scheme is found satisfactory with respect to various metrics.

From the past few years, there has been tremendous growth with respect to the usage of Internet-enabled devices for computing and storage across the globe. These devices have the capabilities of computing as well as communication facilities for smooth execution of various applications. The significance of this type of environment where variety of Internet-enabled devices are interconnected is known as Internet of Things (IoT). Objects/things in IoT may be considered as vehicles and this type of environment is called as Vehicular Cyber–Physical Systems (VCPS). In VCPS environment, there are two planes-physical and cyber. On physical plane, all types of computing and communication devices reside while at the cyber plane service providers such as cloud may exist. However, in VCPS environment, security is one of the major concerns as devices communicate with one another using different protocols which are susceptible to various types of attacks. To address these issues, we propose a novel secure clustering for efficient data dissemination between different devices in VCPS environment. A new trust metric based on varying transmission characteristics of vehicles is defined for trust computation among the different devices which is evaluated both at local, and global levels. This trust metric is used to establish the current security level of vehicles and is the key parameter for creating secure clusters. Algorithms for secure clustering and trust establishment are also designed in the proposed scheme. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated with respect to different evaluation metrics in various network scenarios. The results obtained clearly depicts the satisfactory performance of the proposed scheme in VCPS environment.