Cooperative Position Verification - Defending Against Roadside Attackers 2.0

Security analysis has shown that attacks from roadside attackers constitute the highest risk for vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs). Therefore, protecting them against these attackers is one of the primary goals of security engineering in VANETs. In previous work, the authors introduced a defense mechanism that is able to defend against roadside attackers to a certain extend. The main weaknesses of this mechanism are solved by the additional mechanisms introduced in this work. As in the previous work, vehicles build up trust relations to other vehicles that have been neighbors for a certain time and thus proved their movement. Upon detection of new neighbors, information from already trusted neighbors is used to evaluate the new neighbor. The new approach shortens the evaluation time of new direct neighbors and defends against attackers that try to circumvent the previous defense mechanism by increasing their transmission range.