Trust Assessment Framework

This repository provides the latest prototype of the standalone Trust Assessment Framework.

If you are using the TAF prototype for your own research, please use the following citation:

Trkulja, N., Hermann, A., Duhr, P.L., Meißner, E., Buchholz, M., Kargl, F. and Erb, B. 2025. Vehicle-to-Everything Trust: Enabling Autonomous Trust Assessment of V2X Data by Vehicles. Proceedings of the 2025 Cyber Security in CarS Workshop (Taipei, Taiwan, 2025).

@inproceedings{Trkulja2025trust,
	author = {Trkulja, Nata\v{s}a and Hermann, Artur and Duhr, Paul Lukas and Mei\ss{}ner, Echo and Buchholz, Michael and Kargl, Frank and Erb, Benjamin},
	title = {Vehicle-to-Everything Trust: Enabling Autonomous Trust Assessment of V2X Data by Vehicles},
	year = {2025},
	isbn = {9798400719288},
	publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
	address = {New York, NY, USA},
	url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3736130.3762691},
	doi = {10.1145/3736130.3762691},
	abstract = {Connected and automated vehicles rely on data from various entities to support safety-critical applications such as Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC). However, unauthorized data manipulation through, for example, data injection attacks can compromise vehicle safety and lead to incidents. Existing vehicular security mechanisms, such as Misbehavior Detection System (MBD), have limitations in detecting and mitigating all types of threats on their own. To address these limitations, our prior work has proposed the concept of a Trust Assessment Framework (TAF), which assesses data trustworthiness by combining evidence from multiple security systems operating as trust sources. However, TAF as a concept has not been extensively evaluated in safety-critical Cooperative Driving (CD) applications. In this work, we refine the architecture of the TAF and implement a software prototype based on it. We integrate the TAF prototype with a CACC simulation environment and implement three types of data injection attacks. We demonstrate that by incorporating multiple security mechanisms as trust sources, the TAF significantly improves attack detection performance and reduces the number of crashes by 86\% compared to using a single security mechanism, such as MBD.},
	booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2nd Cyber Security in CarS Workshop},
	articleno = {8},
	numpages = {14},
	keywords = {Trust assessment framework, V2X network security, cooperative driving, cyber-physical systems},
	location = {Taipei, Taiwan},
	series = {CSCS '25},
}

Gettting Started

Gettting a Pre-Compiled Binary

You can get a pre-compiled version of the standalone TAF in the Releases section.

Build from Source

First, clone this repository:

git clone [email protected]:coordination/go-taf.git

Also clone the following internal dependencies into a shared common folder:

git clone [email protected]:coordination/tlee-implementation.git
git clone [email protected]:coordination/crypto-library-interface.git

The resulting folder structure should look like this:

├── crypto-library-interface
├── go-taf
└── tlee-implementation

Next, go to the go-taf directory and run make:

cd go-taf
make build

To run the TAF, you can also use make:

make run

To build and run the TAF with an enabled debugging webinterface, you can use the following make command:

GOFLAGS=-tags=webui make run

Configuration

The TAF uses an internal configuration with hardcoded defaults. To change the configuration, you can use a JSON file (template located in res/taf.json) and specify the actual file location in the environment variable TAF_CONFIG. The following options can be configured. Missing options are implicitly using their defined default values.

{
  "Identifier": "taf",                  // internal identifier of this instance 
  "Communication": {
    "Kafka": {
      "Broker": "localhost:9092",       // address and port of the kafka bootstrap server
      "TafTopic": "taf"                 // kafka topic the TAF will consume
    },
    "TafEndpoint": "taf",               // kafka identifier of TAF component
    "AivEndpoint": "aiv",               // kafka identifier of AIV component
    "MbdEndpoint": "mbd"                // kafka identifier of MBD component
  },
  "Logging": {
    "LogLevel": 2,                      // log level: 1=TRACE, 2=DEBUG, 3=INFO,
                                        //    4=WARN, 5=ERROR, 6=FATAL, 7=PRINT
    "LogStyle": "PRETTY"                // log style: 'PRETTY', 'JSON', or 'PLAIN'
  },
  "Crypto": {
    "Enabled": true,                    // whether the crypto library should be used or not
    "KeyFolder": "res/cert/",           // path to key folder that is passed to crypto library
    "IgnoreVerificationResults": false  // false: discard messages that failed to verify
                                        // true: process messages that failed to verify
                                        //        (a warning will be logged to console)
  },
  "Debug": {
    "FixedSessionID": "",               // if provided, this fixed value is used by the TAM
                                        // instead of a random UUID-based session id
    "FixedSubscriptionID": "",          // if provided, this fixed value is used by the TAM
                                        // instead of a random UUID-based subscription id
    "FixedRequestID": ""                // if provided, this fixed request id is used by the
                                        // trust source manager instead of a random UUID-based id
  },
  "Evidence": {
    "AIV": {
      "CheckInterval": 1000             // check interval (in msec) passed to AIV in AivSubscribeRequest
    }
  },
  "TLEE": {
    "UseInternalTLEE": false            // false: use HUAWEI TLEE implementation
                                        // true: use internal mockup TLEE instead
    "DebuggingMode": false,             // false: disable TLEE debugging features
                                        // true: enable TLEE debugging features
    "FilePath": "debug/"                // path to be used for TLEE debugging file output 
  },
  "V2X" : {
    "NodeTTLsec" : 5,                   // The time to live of a node (vehicle) in seconds based on CPMs.
                                        // If there is no message after that time span, the vehicle
                                        // is considered to be gone. 
    "CheckIntervalSec" : 1              // The interval in seconds how often vehicles should be checked
                                        // for TTL expiries (see above).
  }
}

Updating Message Schema and Auto-Generating Go Structs

Warning: This step is only necessary after modifying existing schemas or adding new schemas. Don't do this step unless you know that it is really necessary, as it overwrites existing code and may break the existing TAF implementation.

This step requires quicktype. Having node/npm already installed, you can install it using:

npm install -g quicktype

All JSON schemas are located in the folder res/schemas/. By running the command below, corresponding Go structs will be generated into the directory pkg/message/<namespace>/.

make generate-structs 

To remove existing structs, you can use the following command:

make clean-structs 

Again, please note that adding new schemas/structs will require manual code changes in addition to the auto-generation of the structs.

See Also

• Tools for Standalone TAF: playback and watch tools for TAF development and testing
• Trust Assessment Framework Documentation: User Documentation (WIP; currently UUlm-internal)