A secure alert messaging system for safe driving

•We analyze vulnerabilities of an approach for alert message broadcasting to the position cheating attack.•We demonstrate how the position cheating attack delays the transmission of alert messages.•We propose a solution based on collaboration among neighbor vehicles to detect nodes cheating about their position.•We demonstrate how our detection mechanism ensures a correct estimation of vehicles transmission range.•Our detection mechanism allows a quick broadcast of the alert message.

Vehicular safety is an emergent application in inter-vehicular communications. As this application is based on fast multi-hop message propagation, including information such as position, direction, and speed, it is crucial for the data exchange system of the vehicular application to be resilient to security attacks. To make vehicular networks viable and acceptable to consumers, we have to design secure protocols that satisfy the requirements of the vehicular safety applications. The contribution of this work is threefold. First, we analyze the vulnerabilities of a representative approach named Fast Multi-hop Algorithm (FMBA) to the position cheating attack. Second, we devise a fast and secure inter-vehicular accident warning protocol which is resilient against the position cheating attack. Finally, an exhaustive simulation study shows the impact of the attack on the protocol FMBA on delaying the transmission of alert messages. Furthermore, we show that our secure solution is effective in mitigating the position cheating attack.