A Novel Sybil Attack Detection Mechanism for C-ITS

Abstract

Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (C-ITS) are expected to play an important role in our lives. They will improve the traffic safety and bring about a revolution on the driving experience. However, these benefits are counterbalanced by possible attacks that threaten not only the vehicle’s security, but also passengers’ lives. One of the most common attacks is the Sybil attack, which is even more dangerous than others because it could be the starting point of many other attacks in C-ITS. This paper proposes a distributed approach allowing the detection of Sybil attacks by using the traffic flow theory. The key idea here is that each vehicle will monitor its neighbourhood in order to detect an eventual Sybil attack. This is achieved by a comparison between the real accurate speed of the vehicle and the one estimated using the V2V communications with vehicles in the vicinity. The estimated speed is derived by using the traffic flow fundamental diagram of the road’s portion where the vehicles are moving. This detection algorithm is validated through some extensive simulations conducted using the well-known NS3 network simulator with SUMO traffic simulator.