Secure Verification of Location Claims on a Vehicular Safety Application

Traffic safety through inter-vehicular communication is one of the most promising and challenging applications of Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks. In this context, information such as position, direction, and speed, is often broadcast by vehicles so as to facilitate fast multi-hop propagation of possible alert messages. Unfortunately, a malicious vehicle can inject bogus information or cheat about its position. In this work, we analyze the impact of a position cheating attack on an alert message application. We show that this weakness we found could be leveraged by an adversary in a very effective way. Furthermore, our analysis leads us to design a countermeasure to this threat. Finally, we run a set of simulations which confirm our findings.