AbstractEnsuring security in vehicular ad‐hoc networks remains a challenging task because of the high mobility of vehicles and the wireless communication environment. The wireless environment, which is un‐trusted, paves a way for the attackers to perform various attacks at the cost of time, money, safety and human lives. One such attack that needs attention is the impersonation attack because of its ability to disrupt the proper functioning of the network. Existing defense mechanisms viz., public key infrastructure (PKI) methods incur infrastructural overheads, position based verification methods face limitations such as inadaptability to certain environments (one way roads, heavy traffic conditions), high storage, and communication overheads. In this paper, collaborative detection approach for impersonation attacks (CDAI), a position‐based verification scheme based on received signal strength, is proposed to overcome all the existing limitations. Further, a comparative study of CDAI and the existing non‐public key infrastructure defence methods are reported in the paper. Simulation experiments have been conducted on CDAI. From the simulation experiments, it is evident that CDAI achieves a detection rate of 97.85% and a false positive rate of 0.015%. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.