Evaluating the Usefulness of Watchdogs for Intrusion Detection in VANETs

This paper evaluates the usefulness of watchdog modules for intrusion detection. A watchdog is the basic component for the construction of most of the intrusion detection systems proposed so far for self-organizing wireless networking systems like VANETs. Contributions of this work are threefold. First, the component is designed to be protocol independent, thus compatible with any different types of ad hoc routing protocols. Second, it encompasses a high detection coverage with a low detection latency. Third, the previous properties are guaranteed while minimizing the number of generated false positives and negatives The provided design is implemented and evaluated. Results show that a set of trade-offs must be adopted in order to obtain an acceptable balance between the coverage and detection latency of the watchdog and the resources required from devices.