Position claim verification for emergency message propagation in Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks

Pervasive and mobile computing can play a crucial role in the prevention, detection and management of natural and human-caused disasters. In this context, the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is particularly noteworthy due to its recent technological advancements and increasing prevalence. In fact, IoV can be leveraged to improve various applications, including those aimed at reducing the millions of fatalities that occur every year. The effectiveness of these applications often relies on the rapid dissemination of emergency messages through position-based forwarding protocols, which can unfortunately be vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Without loss of generality, we focus on the specific case study of road safety to provide a realistic example and discuss two potential attacks based on fake position claims that malicious nodes could easily execute to compromise the performance of the position-based forwarding protocol. We also propose and analyze a validation system based on machine learning (ML) techniques designed to detect malicious nodes, discard false information, and protect against these attacks.