Title: Filtering false data via authentic consensus in vehicle ad hoc networks

Authors: Zhen Cao, Jiejun Kong, Mario Gerla, Zhong Chen, Jianbin Hu

Addresses: School of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science, Peking University, Beijing 100871, PR China; Key Laboratory of High Confidence Software Technologies, Ministry of Education, Beijing, PR China. ' Department of Computer Science, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA. ' Department of Computer Science, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA. ' School of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science, Peking University, Beijing 100871, PR China; Key Laboratory of High Confidence Software Technologies, Ministry of Education, Beijing, PR China. ' School of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science, Peking University, Beijing 100871, PR China; Key Laboratory of High Confidence Software Technologies, Ministry of Education, Beijing, PR China

Abstract: Emerging applications in vehicle ad hoc networks (VANETs) not only open tremendous business opportunities and navigation benefits, they also pose formidable research challenges in security provisioning. A critical security threat to VANETs is false data injection, that is, an attacker disseminates false information to disrupt the behaviour of the other drivers. Information-driven operations of vehicular networks make false data injection a very effective attack. As the first line of defence, this paper presents the notion of proof-of-relevance (PoR), which consists in proving that the event reporter is authentically relevant to the event it has reported. The PoR is accomplished by collecting authentic consensus on the event from witness vehicles in a cooperative way. Event reports from attackers who fail to provide this PoR are disregarded, making the network immune to bogus data. A formal security analysis is present to show that our scheme is provable secure. Performance evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed scheme.

Keywords: authentic consensus; false data attacks; VANETs; vehicular ad hoc networks; vehicular networks; security; false information; proof-of-relevance.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAACS.2010.031092

International Journal of Autonomous and Adaptive Communications Systems, 2010 Vol.3 No.2, pp.217 - 235

Published online: 20 Jan 2010 *

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