The Position Cheating Attack on Inter-Vehicular Online Gaming

New in-car communications and entertainment systems have emerged, enabling interconnection of various components in vehicles (e.g., TVs, CD/DVD players, media players, and cell phones). With the new advances of automotive industry, car passengers embody the next consumers that will be targeted by online game providers. In this context, researchers on online games demonstrated the importance of the network's performance in determining the quality level perceived by consumers. Enabling games over Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANET) will require the design of secure architectures against threats, in order to not jeopardize the effectiveness of online gaming over VANET. These threats could increase the delivery delay of game events, leading to the unsatisfaction of passengers. In this paper, we address security threats for online gaming over VANET. In particular, we focus on a representative vehicular broadcast algorithm, and we discuss a cheating threat. Indeed, the attacker could use the location-aware game message exchange to cheat about his position, thus enforcing game events to be delayed, and reduce the quality of service. Finally, we run a thorough set of simulations to assess the impact of the position cheating attack to the online gaming over VANET.