SAFE: Spatially-Aware Feedback Enhancement for Fault-Tolerant Trust Management in VANETs

Trust management in VANETs is critically important for secure communication between vehicles. In event-based trust systems, vehicles broadcast the events they witness to their surroundings and send feedback reports about other vehicles to a central authority. However, when the event status changes, vehicles that have left the witness area cannot see this change and produce erroneous feedback. This leads to unfair penalization of honest nodes. To solve this problem, the SAFE (Spatially-Aware Feedback Enhancement) approach is proposed. In SAFE, vehicles continue to record messages as long as they remain in the witness area and send updated feedback reports before leaving the area. Additionally, by keeping records between witness and decision distances, more accurate evaluation is ensured. SAFE and TCEMD were compared in single-event, multi-event, and different decision distance scenarios. The results clearly demonstrate SAFE's superiority. In single-event, feedback report count increased 2.5 times, and in multi-event, it increased over 6 times. Negative feedback rate dropped from 77 percent to below 1 percent. While TCEMD incorrectly blacklisted 34 nodes, this number remained at 1 in SAFE. Even when the decision distance was reduced to 200 m, SAFE showed high accuracy. The findings show that SAFE protects honest nodes in attack-free systems and increases network reliability.