Greedy Routing in Highway Scenarios: The Impact of Position Faking Nodes

Vehicular Ad-Hoc networks (VANETs) have been an active research domain during the past few years. Work so far focused on routing and applications, however, research on security issues has been started only recently. One of the fundamental results of past and ongoing research projects in the domain of vehicular ad-hoc networks is the usage of geographic routing protocols. On the one hand this is due to the fact that they are well suited to highly dynamic network topologies. On the other hand VANETs are assumed to provide location based services, which would also benefit from position aware routing. In this paper, we analyze the potential impact of false position information in beacon messages on geographic routing. We assume that false position information is distributed either by malicious nodes or by defective nodes. For the analysis, we focus on highway scenarios with respective vehicular movement patterns. Our results show severe performance degradation even in case there is only a low percentage (10%) of maliciously acting nodes that combine position information falsification with subsequent message dropping.