Detecting misbehavior (such as transmissions of false information) in
vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) is very important problem with wide range of
implications including safety related and congestion avoidance applications. We
discuss several limitations of existing misbehavior detection schemes (MDS)
designed for VANETs. Most MDS are concerned with detection of malicious nodes.
In most situations, vehicles would send wrong information because of selfish
reasons of their owners, e.g. for gaining access to a particular lane. Because
of this (\emph{rational behavior}), it is more important to detect false
information than to identify misbehaving nodes. We introduce the concept of
data-centric misbehavior detection and propose algorithms which detect false
alert messages and misbehaving nodes by observing their actions after sending
out the alert messages. With the data-centric MDS, each node can independently
decide whether an information received is correct or false. The decision is
based on the consistency of recent messages and new alert with reported and
estimated vehicle positions. No voting or majority decisions is needed, making
our MDS resilient to Sybil attacks. Instead of revoking all the secret
credentials of misbehaving nodes, as done in most schemes, we impose fines on
misbehaving nodes (administered by the certification authority), discouraging
them to act selfishly. This reduces the computation and communication costs
involved in revoking all the secret credentials of misbehaving nodes.Comment: 12 page