VANET Cluster Based Gray Hole Attack Detection and Prevention

VANET is an emerging technology for intelligent transportation systems in smart cities. Vehicle communication raises many challenges, notably in the fields of communication security and road safety. This paper focuses on one of the security issues of VANETs, which is the gray hole attack. In gray hole attack, messages are dropped randomly, making them difficult to detect in large, dynamic network. The cluster based method to detect and prevent the gray hole attack has been proposed in this paper. Clustering is fast and easy method for detection and reduces the consumption of resources thereby improving the performance of the network. Clustering is an effective approach to deal with this attack by strengthening network security measures and minimizing its impact. In addition to providing security, the suggested technique contributes to enhance network performance in terms of metrics—packet delivery ratio, end-to-end delay, packet loss and throughput. This work has been implemented through NS2 network simulator.