Analysis of Realistic Attack Scenarios in Vehicle Ad-hoc Networks

The pace of technological development in automotive and transportation has been accelerating rapidly in recent years. Automation of driver assistance systems, autonomous driving, increasing vehicle connectivity and emerging inter-vehicular communication (V2V) are among the most disruptive innovations, the latter of which also raises numerous unprecedented security concerns. This paper is focused on the security of V2V communication in vehicle ad-hoc networks (VANET) with the main goal of identifying realistic attack scenarios and evaluating their impact, as well as possible security countermeasures to thwart the attacks. The evaluation has been done in OMNeT++ simulation environment and the results indicate that common attacks, such as replay attack or message falsification, can be eliminated by utilizing digital signatures and message validation. However, detection and mitigation of advanced attacks such as Sybil attack requires more complex approach. The paper also presents a simple detection method of Sybil nodes based on measuring the signal strength of received messages and maintaining reputation of sending nodes. The evaluation results suggest that the presented method is able to detect Sybil nodes in VANET and contributes to the improvement of traffic flow.