Secure Relative Location Determination in Vehicular Network

Relative location information is very useful in vehicular networks although it is vulnerable to various attacks. Many techniques have been proposed for relative positioning and location verification. Due to the high speed and the strict security requirements, the existing relative positioning and location verification techniques are not directly applicable to vehicular networks. Hence we present a scheme called SRLD, which securely determines the relative locations of a set of wirelessly connected vehicles based on the relative locations of each vehicle’s surrounding vehicles. SRLD uses cryptographic keys to authenticate location messages and uses a vehicle’s public key to identify the vehicle while protecting drivers’ privacy. To defend against Sybil attacks, SRLD employs registration and ticket verification mechanisms. It defends Wormhole and black hole attacks by probabilistically monitoring losses of relative location messages. Analysis and simulation results show that SRLD is lightweight and is resilient to Sybil, Wormhole and some other attacks.