Decentralized Detection of GPS Spoofing in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

This letter proposes a decentralized scheme for the detection of global positioning system (GPS) spoofing in vehicular ad hoc networks. In this scheme, vehicles exchange their measured GPS code pseudo-ranges with neighboring vehicles using dedicated short-range communications. The vehicles then perform linear operations on the exchanged GPS data and derive independent statistics that are related to the measurements of each neighbor. Using these statistics, a vehicle implements a cumulative sum procedure to locally detect high correlations in the time of arrival of spoofed GPS signals. The vehicles report their local detection values to an elected head vehicle, which employs a min–max change-detection procedure to optimize the global-spoofing detection. Our experimental results show that: 1) the average detection delay decreases as the number of vehicles increase and 2) the proposed scheme converges to optimal as the probability of false-alarm reduces to zero.