Phantom jam Sybil attack in connected vehicular networks

Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) are vulnerable to Sybil attacks, mostly due to the lack of encryption in BSMs. In VANETs, multiple digital certificates (pseudonyms) are assigned to each vehicle to ensure their privacy. However, malicious nodes can exploit these pseudonyms to create ghost vehicles, inducing fake traffic jams and disturbance to other vehicles which may lead to accidents. In this work, we have developed the first sophisticated sybil attack, in which an attacker uses legitimate pseudonyms to create multiple ghost vehicles. These ghost vehicles transmit realistic kinematic data, using trajectory formulas and road maps. Additionally, the ghost vehicles randomly simulate sudden brakes before acceleration to cause sudden reactions from surrounding vehicles, potentially leading to collisions. The attack was tested using a mainstream simulation framework. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed attack is evasive to the state-of-the-art misbehavior detection systems.