DoS attack detection in Internet-connected vehicles

The paper presents a light weight technique to detect the Denial of Service (DoS) behavior applied by malicious users in Internet-connected vehicles using Wi-Fi to access the Internet via hotspots installed on the roads. Malicious nodes manipulate the IEEE 802.11 DCF standards to illegally gain extra throughput and increase the probability of having a successful packet transmission on the expense of the honest users that follow the protocol standards. The theoretical network throughput is derived using two-dimensional Markov Chain to determine the network capacity. Results obtained by the theoretical computations are validated by network simulation to determine the baseline for the maximum achievable throughput in the network under fair conditions where all nodes follow the IEEE standards. An approach is presented to enable all the nodes in IEEE 802.11 network with a mechanism to detect and identify the malicious nodes in a distributed environment. Results are presented to prove the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed algorithm.