VANETGuard: A Scalable Lightweight Trust Management System for 5G-Enabled Smart Vehicular Networks

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) are essential to intelligent transportation systems (ITS), enabling secure, real-time communication among vehicles and infrastructure. However, their decentralized and dynamic nature makes them vulnerable to threats such as Sybil attacks, message forgery, replay attacks, and Denial-of-Service (DoS). This paper presents VANETGuard, a lightweight scalable trust management system that enhances security and scalability in 5G-enabled smart vehicular networks. The proposed system integrates entropy-based anomaly detection, Bayesian inference for adaptive trust scoring, and a lightweight distributed ledger for decentralized, tamper-resistant trust storage. Large-scale simulations under realistic traffic and attack conditions demonstrate that VANETGuard achieves 99.97% detection accuracy, significantly reduces false positives, and maintains low latency and computational overhead while supporting over 300 vehicles. These results highlight VANETGuard’s potential to enable secure, efficient, and scalable trust mechanisms in next-generation ITS and urban mobility systems.