Privacy Aware Prevention of Sybil Attack in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

AbstractVehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are prone to various threats. One type of attack is Sybil attack, where an attacker uses multiple identities to corrupt the applications of VANETs for his benefits. Vehicles exchange information in the neighborhood. Importance of such information makes privacy a major concern in VANETs. In this paper, we propose an approach that prevents Sybil attacks in privacy preserved vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). Proposed approach uses public key and symmetric key encryption techniques for securing the communication in VANET. RSUs distribute unique token to each vehicle which in turn are consumed to report events. It is a pseudonym-less approach that helps in preserving the privacy of vehicles. In VANET vehicles detect events and dynamically create cluster. Then they choose cluster-head for communicating with RSU about the event. Sybil attacker can use same token in different messages for misleading other vehicles. But cluster-head as well as all vehicles in the cluster collects tokens from neighbors. Then they figure out for a particular event any message includes identical token then attacker is subject to be revoked by all other vehicles in the cluster.KeywordsSybil attackVANETPrivacyClusteringV2V