Vehicular security through reputation and plausibility checks

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are essentially used to communicate real-time traffic and safety information. In this paper, we present vehicular security through reputation and plausibility checks to address the most important issue of security in VANETs. The algorithm provides security against the attacks of event modification, false event generation, data aggregation and data dropping. It performs not only detection but also the isolation of malicious nodes in the network. It employs sensors in a reputation-based system and presents a very robust yet cost efficient approach as it utilizes just vehicle to vehicle communication, thereby reducing the security issues and cost associated with the roadside infrastructure. The algorithm has been simulated and tested on various scenarios and has been observed to be very effective and efficient in terms of the percentage of malicious nodes detected, number of control packets sent after detection of malicious nodes, average time taken to detect nodes which are generating false information, number of packets dropped, and the number of packets received by malicious nodes. © 2007-2012 IEEE.