On the use of a Cooperative Neighbor Position Verification scheme to secure warning message dissemination in VANETs

Efficient schemes for warning message dissemination in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) use context information collected by vehicles about their neighbor nodes to guide the dissemination process. These schemes maximize their performance when all the vehicles advertise correct information about their positions, and hence position errors may drastically reduce the performance of the dissemination process. We present a proactive Cooperative Neighbor Position and Verification (CNPV) protocol that detects nodes advertising false locations so as to mitigate the impact of adversarial users. We combine our mechanism with two warning dissemination schemes for VANETs, and demonstrate how these algorithms can benefit from the use of our security scheme in the presence of malicious nodes trying to exploit the inherent vulnerabilities of each algorithm.