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On Secure and Privacy-Aware Sybil Attack Detection in Vehicular Communications

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Abstract

The foreseen dream of Vehicular Ad Hoc NETwork (VANET) deployment is obstructed by long-chased security and privacy nightmares. Despite of the increasing demand for perfect privacy, it conflicts with rather more serious security threat called ‘Sybil Attack’ which refers to, impersonation of one physical entity for many, namely Sybil nodes. In such circumstances, data received from malicious Sybil attacker may seem as if it was received from many distinct physical nodes. Sybil nodes may deliberately mislead other neighbors, resulting in catastrophic situations like traffic jams or even deadly accidents. Preventing such attacks in a privacy-enabled environment is not a trivial task. In this paper, we aim at two conflicting goals, i.e. privacy and Sybil attack in VANET. We leverage pseudonymless beaconing in order to preserve privacy. To cope with Sybil attack, we put forth a twofold strategy. In order to avoid Sybil attack through scheduled beacons, we employ tamper resistant module (TRM) to carry out a pre-assembly data analysis on data that is used to assemble beacons whereas for event reporting message (ERM), we employ road side units (RSUs) to localize Sybil nodes in VANET and report them to the revocation authority(s). RSUs distribute authorized tokens among the benign vehicular nodes which in turn are consumed to report ERMs. RSUs collect ERMs for certain event and figures out if more than one ERM for the same event includes identical token or, if an ERM is sent more than once by the same source. Our proposed scheme preserves privacy in both beacons and ERMs, and provides conditional anonymity where in case of a dispute; malicious attackers are subject to revocation. We also show that our proposed scheme outperforms the previously proposed scheme from security and computational complexity standpoint.

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Notes

  1. The notion of DMV might be different depending upon the government structure of the country.

  2. Terms ‘vehicles’, ‘vehicular nodes’, and ‘nodes’ are used in this paper interchangeably.

  3. The terms ‘event reporting’ and ‘warning’ are used interchangeably in this paper because ERM serves as warning to the receiver as well.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) Grant funded by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (No. 2012-R1A2A2A01046986). This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) Grant funded by the Korea government (MEST) (No. 2012-R1A1A2009152). This research was supported by the MSIP Ministry of Science, ICT & Future Planning, Korea, under the ITRC (Information Technology Research Center) support program (NIPA-2013-H0301-13-1002) supervised by the NIPA(National IT Industry Promotion Agency).

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  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Hanyang University, ERICA Campus, Sa 3-dong, Sangnok-gu, Ansan, Gyeonggi, 426-791, South Korea

    Rasheed Hussain & Heekuck Oh

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  1. Rasheed Hussain
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  2. Heekuck Oh
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Correspondence to Heekuck Oh.

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Hussain, R., Oh, H. On Secure and Privacy-Aware Sybil Attack Detection in Vehicular Communications. Wireless Pers Commun 77, 2649–2673 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-014-1659-5

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