Trust Based Approach in Adjacent Vehicles to Mitigate Sybil Attacks in VANET

Abstract

Vehicular Ad-Hoc Network (VANET) is a form of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) wireless communication between vehicles, which is characterized by the high mobility. In practice, VANET can be utilized to cater connections via multi-hop communication between vehicles to provide traffic information seamlessly, such as traffic jam and traffic accident, without the need of dedicated centralized infrastructure. Although dedicated infrastructures may also be involved in VANET, such as Road Side Units (RSUs), most of the time VANET relies solely on Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication, which makes it vulnerable to several potential attacks in P2P based communication, as there are no trusted authorities that provide authentication and security. One of the potential threats is a Sybil attack, wherein an adversary uses a considerable number of forged identities to illegitimately infuse false or biased information which may mislead a system into making decisions benefiting the adversary. Avoiding Sybil attacks in VANET is a difficult problem, as there are typically no trusted authorities that provide cryptographic assurance of Sybil resilience. This paper presents a technique to detect and mitigate Sybil attacks, which requires no dedicated infrastructure, by utilizing just V2V communication. The proposed method work based on underlying assumption that says the mobility of vehicles in high vehicle density and the limited transmission power of the adversary creates unique groups of vehicle neighbors at a certain time point, which can be calculated in a statistical fashion providing a temporal and spatial analysis to verify real and impersonated vehicle identities. The proposed method also covers the mitigation procedures to create a trust model and announce neighboring vehicles regarding the detected tempered identities in a secure way utilizing Diffie-Hellman key distribution. This paper also presents discussions concerning the proposed approach with regard to benefits and drawbacks of sparse road condition and other potential threats.