Masters Theses

Abstract

"A Sybil attack is one where an adversary assumes multiple identities with the purpose of defeating an existing reputation system. When Sybil attacks are launched in vehicular networks, an added challenge in detecting malicious nodes is mobility that makes it increasingly difficult to tie a node to the location of attacks. In this thesis, we present an innovative protocol for Sybil detection in vehicular networks. Considering that vehicular networks are cyber-physical systems integrating cyber and physical components, our technique exploits well grounded results in the physical (i.e., transportation) domain to tackle the Sybil problem in the cyber domain. Compared to existing works that rely on additional cyber hardware support, or complex cryptographic primitives for Sybil detection, the key innovation in our protocol is leverage the theory of platoon dispersion that models the physics of naturally occurring dispersion in roads. Specifically, our technique employs a certain number of roadside units that periodically collect reports from vehicles regarding their physical neighborhood as they move in roads. Leveraging from existing models of platoon dispersion, we design a protocol to detect anomalously close neighborhoods that are reflective of Sybil attacks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work integrating a well established theory in transportation engineering for detecting cyber space attacks in vehicular networks. The resulting protocol is naturally simple, efficient and performs very well"--Abstract, page iii.

Advisor(s)

Chellappan, Sriram

Committee Member(s)

Kessentini, Marouane
Yin, Zhaozheng

Department(s)

Computer Science

Degree Name

M.S. in Computer Science

Sponsor(s)

King Saud University

Publisher

Missouri University of Science and Technology

Publication Date

Spring 2013

Pagination

vi, 22 pages

Note about bibliography

Includes bibliographical references (pages 20-21).

Rights

© 2013 Muhammad Ibrahim Almutaz, All rights reserved.

Document Type

Thesis - Open Access

File Type

text

Language

English

Subject Headings

Vehicular ad hoc networks (Computer networks) -- Security measures
Traffic engineering -- Computer simulation
Location-based services -- Security measures

Thesis Number

T 10371

Print OCLC #

862977430

Electronic OCLC #

909878668

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