Design and Evaluation of Cooperative Location Verification Protocol for Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have attracted much attention over the last few years. VANETs own several significant characteristics, such as the high-rate changing topology led by velocity of vehicles, time-and-location critical safety applications, and Global Positioning System (GPS) devices. In VANETs, as vehicle movement is usually restricted in just bidirectional movements along the roads and streets, geographical location information becomes very useful. In addition, many studies show that position-based routing protocol is a more promising routing strategy for VANETs; therefore security and verification of location information are necessary to be researched. In this thesis, a location verification approach, namely the Cooperative Location Verification (CLV) protocol, is proposed, aiming to prevent position-spoofing attacks on VANETs. The CLV basically uses two vehicles, a Verifier and a Cooperator, to verify the claimed position of a vehicle (Prover), according to two challenge-response procedures. Additionally, the security analysis of the CLV is presented. In order to enhance the CLV by reduce the network overhead, a reputation management system is designed. It utilizes the verification results of the CLV application and maintain every vehicle’s reliability in the network. In addition, the solution to sparse networks is briefly discussed. In the simulation, the results show that the proposed CLV performs better than another location verification algorithm, namely the Secure Location Verification (SLV). And the effectiveness of the reputation management system is also demonstrated.