Enhancing the Security of Local DangerWarnings in VANETs - A Simulative Analysis of Voting Schemes

The upcoming deployment of vehicular ad-hoc networks does not only facilitate novel telematics applications, but also poses strong requirements on security. Especially the adoption of active safety applications may raise new threats to road safety if security issues are not properly handled, thus thwarting their initial purpose. In this paper, a special active safety application is considered that enables cooperative fore sighted driving through the exchange of local danger warnings, which are based on individual observations and refer to the current road condition. From a security point of view, the decision whether or not such an application should rely on a reported hazard, is a crucial issue, which cannot be completely protected by conventional security measures. We propose an additional security mechanism based on an information centric evaluation of the plausibility of received hazard messages. We developed four decision methods, which are based on voting schemes, and evaluated them by simulation using two attacks trying to manipulate the decision process by distributing false information. Our results indicate that the proposed information centric evaluation of remote observations is a reasonable means to increase the stability and security of a cooperative local danger warning service