Securing vehicular ad-hoc networks from data falsification attacks

Data falsification attack is one of the main security issues in vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) where vehicles rely on information received from other peers/vehicles. In this paper, we propose a method to detect data falsification attack using hash chains for enhancing the network performance by adapting contention window size to forward accurate information to the neighboring vehicles in a timely manner (to improve throughput while reducing end-to-end delay). Performance of the proposed approach is evaluated using numerical results obtained from simulations. We found that the proposed adaptive approach prevents VANET from data falsification attacks and provides higher throughput with lower delay.