Distributed consensus-based Sybil nodes detection in VANETs

Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) is a research area focusing on improving road safety and traffic management. However, VANETs are still vulnerable to different kind of security attacks due to its infrastructure-less networking. Sybil Attack is a well-known attack in VANET. It forges multiple nodes with different identities to broadcast fake messages to manipulate the road traffic and information. In this paper, we propose a distributed detection mechanism using the neighborhood information. In our approach, a node is considered as a Sybil node if its position is inside the intersected area of two communication nodes, but it does not acknowledge by one of them. Each vehicle exchanges the information of their neighbors periodically via beacon message. The received neighbor information, from each neighbor, will be used to vote on each of the receiver node's neighbor whether they are Sybil. Simulation on different test cases are performed to observe the performance of our algorithm in term of its detection rate and false positive rate. The result depicts the increase of detection rate in the scenario where the number of surrounding neighbors is high.