Man-in-the-middle attacks in vehicular ad-hoc networks: Evaluating the impact of attackers’ strategies

Vehicular Ad-Hoc Network (VANET), a vital component of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) technology, relies on communication between dynamically connected vehicles and static Road Side Units (RSU) to offer various applications (e.g., collision avoidance alerts, steep-curve warnings and infotainment). VANET has a massive potential to improve traffic efficiency, and road safety by exchanging critical information between nodes (vehicles and RSU), thus reducing the likelihood of traffic accidents. However, this communication between nodes is subject to a variety of attacks, such as Man-In-The-Middle (MITM) attacks which represent a major risk in VANET. It happens when a malicious node intercepts or tampers with messages exchanged between legitimate nodes. In this paper, we studied the impact on network performance of different strategies which attackers can adopt to launch MITM attacks in VANET, such as fleet or random strategies. In particular, we focus on three goals of MITM attacks—message delayed, message dropped and message tampered. The simulation results indicate that these attacks have a severe influence on the legitimate nodes in VANET as the network experience high number of compromised messages, high end-to-end delays and preeminent packet losses.