Resilient Privacy Preservation Scheme to Detect Sybil Attacks in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Objective: Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) have the potential to improve road safety dramatically, regulate traffic, management of parking lots and public areas. Security and Privacy are two significant concerns in VANETs, as a malicious vehicle may deliberately deceive other vehicles in the network. Analysis: Disastrously, several privacy-preserving methods are susceptible to Sybil attacks, whereby a malicious vehicle impersonates as multiple benign vehicles for gaining a disproportionately large influence. Conventional pseudonym generation schemes preserve driver’s privacy and also facilitate identifying the Sybil attacker. However, the pseudonym scheme induces a brand new issue where in a smart attacker may compromise semi-trusted RSUs and launch a Sybil attack in a particular area. Findings: This paper proposes a System for detecting misbehavior vehicles with location Privacy (SYBIL-CAP), consisting TcA - Preserving Location Privacy (TAP-LOOP), and Resilience to RSU compromise (RESUME) for identifying Sybil attacker. SYBIL-CAP provides a temporarily authorized certificate that includes the trusted certificate and secret key trajectories to vehicles to recognize compromised RSU without requiring the unique identity of vehicles. More precisely, in TAP-LOOP, a vehicle approaches a TCA to receive a location-hidden trusted certificate via RSU to conceal its sensitive information at all times. RESUME implements Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange (DHKE) algorithm between two adjacent RSUs to generate a shared secret key, appended in the temporarily authorized certificate. A vehicle identifies the compromised RSU and malicious vehicle by verifying the authorized message at a group of three consecutive RSUs. Improvement: The simulation results depict that the SYBIL-CAP largely restricts Sybil attack by detecting compromised RSU with lower overhead, compared to existing P2DAP.