Position forging attacks in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks: Implementation, impact and detection

Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) applications operate on the principle of periodic exchange of messages between nodes. However, a malicious node can create multiple virtual identities for transmitting fake messages using different forged positions. This creates an illusion of a non-existent event. In VANET, each vehicle periodically broadcasts its identity (ID), time and current geographic position in beacon packets. Node position and time are important factors for modeling an attack as well as for its detection. In this paper, we introduce new variants of (a) Position forging attacks and (b) Combination of position and ID forging attacks. We also propose an implementation of these attacks, their impact on the performance of VANET and description of detection methodology. In a position forging attack, an attacker broadcasts timely coordinated wrong traffic warning messages with forged positions, producing an illusion of a car accident, a traffic jam or an emergency braking. This degrades the performance of VANET in terms of channel utilization. It also has a severe impact on the performance of security algorithms. We analyze the impact of forged position information on average vehicle speed, percentage of delivered packets and number of collisions.