COLAW: Cooperative Location Proof Architecture for VANETs based on Witnessing

Vehicular applications heavily rely on location information to improve road safety and efficiency as well as to provide a personalized driving experience through a variety of location-based services. To determine their position, vehicles depend on different technologies like GPS, which might be unreliable or vulnerable to interference or spoofing. In the safety-critical vehicular world, a secure mechanism must be in place which guarantees the accuracy and trustworthiness of location information to the service that requires it. In this work we propose COLAW, a COoperative Location proof Architecture based on Witnessing that leverages the distributed nature of vehicular ad-hoc networks to create verifiable and secure location proofs. The evaluation of COLAW shows that it is possible for a group of neighboring vehicles to generate secure location proofs for each other with a significantly lower message overhead than previously proposed approaches and that the protocol’s performance can be further improved, by taking certain environmental parameters and road conditions into consideration.