An Effective Privacy-Aware Sybil Attack Detection Scheme for Secure Communication in Vehicular Ad Hoc Network

Nowadays, VANET plays significant role to enhance safety, mobility and convenience applications in intelligent transportation system. However, security in such systems still remains a big challenge because of its large coverage, wireless communication and high-speed mobility of the nodes. Sybil attack as a serious security threat creates new identities for neighboring vehicles or steals vehicles identities for the attacker. The purposes of creating invalid identities are network disruption, misleading neighbor vehicles for traffic jams or fatal and tragic accidents, opening the road, disruption in voting based systems, and violating traffic safety briefly. In the present study, a privacy-aware Sybil attack detection (PASAD) scheme is proposed to solve two conflicting goals: to preserve the privacy and to detect the Sybil attack in the vehicle to vehicle (V2V) and vehicle to roadside unit (V2R) communications. The proposed scheme is based on a safe physical authentication and Boneh-Shacham (BS) short group signature scheme. The theatrical analyzes show that this scheme ensures the security requirements like correctness, privacy, unforgeability, traceability, and Sybil attack detection in exchanges of warning messages. Extensive simulations and analysis demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed scheme in vehicular networks.