Illusion Attack on VANET Applications - A Message Plausibility Problem

In order to reduce car accidents, provide emergency information, novel applications on vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have drawn a lot of attention in resent years. This paper presents a new security threat on VANET applications called illusion attack. In this attack, based on the current during condition on the road, the adversary broadcasts the scene-aligned traffic warning messages, which produce an illusion to cars at its neighborhood. In consequence, the illusion can largely manipulate other drivers' behaviors on their responses. The illusion attack can easily cause car accident, traffic jam and the decrease of VANET performance in terms of bandwidth utilization. We discuss the reasons why traditional authentication mechanisms cannot resolve this security threat effectively and propose a new model, called plausibility validation network (PVN), to remedy the illusion attack. Finally, we analyze the security properties and potential overhead of proposed model.