A novel approach to detect Sybil attacks in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks(VANETs) are vehicle to vehicle and vehicle to road side infrastructure networks which make this possible by providing support to numerous applications aimed towards improving safety and driving experience on the road such as traffic control, accident avoidance, and a variety of other applications. The two major concerns in VANETs are Security and privacy. VANETs are subject to attacks due to their vulnerabilities; one of the most compromising attacks is called Sybil nodes attack (a malicious vehicle pretends to be multiple other vehicles). Reported data from a Sybil attacker will appear to arrive from a large number of distinct vehicles, and hence will be credible. This paper proposes a light-weight and scalable framework to detect Sybil attacks. Importantly, The detection of Sybil attacks done in distributed manner that does not require any vehicle in the network to disclose its identity; hence privacy is preserved at all times.