A Grid-based Misbehavior Detection System for Vehicular Communication Networks

A vehicular communication network allows vehicles on the road to be connected by wireless links, providing road safety in vehicular environments. Vehicular communication network is vulnerable to various types of attacks. Cryptographic techniques are used to prevent attacks such as message modification or vehicle impersonation. However, cryptographic techniques are not enough to protect against insider attacks where an attacking vehicle has already been authenticated in the network. Vehicular network safety services rely on periodic broadcasts of basic safety messages (BSMs) from vehicles in the network that contain important information about the vehicles such as position, speed, received signal strength (RSSI) etc. Malicious vehicles can inject false position information in a BSM to commit a position falsification attack which is one of the most dangerous insider attacks in vehicular networks. Position falsification attacks can lead to traffic jams or accidents given false position information from vehicles in the network. A misbehavior detection system (MDS) is an efficient way to detect such attacks and mitigate their impact. Existing MDSs require a large amount of features which increases the computational complexity to detect these attacks. In this paper, we propose a novel grid-based misbehavior detection system which utilizes the position information from the BSMs. Our model is tested on a publicly available dataset and is applied using five classification algorithms based on supervised learning. Our model performs multi-classification and is found to be superior compared to other existing methods that deal with position falsification attacks.