General Active Position Detectors Protect VANET Security

Vehicle position is one of the most valuable pieces of information in a Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET). The main contribution of this work is a novel approach to enhancing position security in VANETs. We propose a general active detection architecture including two components: eye-devices and ear-devices. Eye-devices include radar, infrared, camera, etc. Ear-device is the wireless transceiver. We achieve local security by enlisting the help of several on-board eye-devices to detect neighboring vehicles and to confirm their announced position coordinates heard by ear-device. We apply cosine similarity to these data to reach an agreed-location. Our solution is predicated on the widely accepted assumption that the vast majorities of vehicles are honest and behave responsively.