Securing warning message dissemination in VANETs using cooperative neighbor position verification

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. Based on this information, vehicles autonomously decide whether they are the most appropriate forwarding nodes. These schemes maximize their performance when all the vehicles advertise correct information about their positions, but position errors may drastically reduce the performance of the dissemination process. We present a proactive cooperative neighbor position verification protocol that detects nodes advertising false locations and selects optimal forwarders to mitigate the impact of adversarial users. We combine our mechanism with two warning dissemination schemes for VANETs and demonstrate how the latter can benefit from the use of our security scheme in the presence of malicious nodes trying to exploit known system vulnerabilities.