SDRP: a secure distributed revocation protocol for vehicular environments

Secure routing protocols that are based only on cryptographic techniques cannot guarantee security against all attacks. Among solutions that have been proposed to enhance the security in vehicular networks are the distributed revocation protocols, which provide vehicles with the ability to quickly detect and avoid malicious attacks. However, most of the proposed revocation protocols are vulnerable to colluding attacks conducted by malicious nodes, a situation which results in denial of service. In this work, we propose a new and robust distributed revocation protocol for vehicular ad hoc networks, called Secure Distributed Revocation Protocol (SDRP), with the main objective to exclude misbehaving nodes conducting or not a colluding attack from the routing operation in VANET. We present an evaluation analysis of SDRP on the basis of the simulation results and show that our scheme provides a high detection rate of misbehaving nodes with a low rate of false positives even in the presence of a large number of attackers. Copyright (c) 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.