On Location Security Solutions in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Location information is considered to be of prime importance in Vehicular Ad Hoc NETworks (VANETs) because important decisions are made based on accurate and sound location information. Vehicles exchange their whereabouts in the form of scheduled beacon messages with their neighbors. These messages contain location, speed, time, and lane information etc. In this paper we aim at the location security in VANET and emphasize on the confidentiality and integrity of location information in case of Nonline-of-Sight (NLoS). For location confidentiality we propose a geolock-based mechanism whereas for location integrity we leverage cooperation among neighbors. In case of NLoS, the verifier vehicle asks its one-hop neighbors in an efficient way to verify the claimed location of the node on his behalf. On the basis of trust values and weightage assigned to neighbors, it is decided whether the verification is sound.