Significant developments took place over the past few years in the area of vehicular communication (VC) systems. Now, it is well-understood in the community that security and protection of private user information are a prerequisite for the deployment of the technology. This is so exactly because the benefits of VC systems, with the mission to enhance transportation safety and efficiency, are at stake. Without the integration of strong and practical security and privacy enhancing mechanisms, VC systems could be disrupted or disabled even by relatively unsophisticated attackers. We address this problem within the SeVeCom project, having developed a security architecture that provides a comprehensive and practical solution. We present our results in a set of two papers in this issue. In this first one, we analyze threats and types of adversaries, we identify security and privacy requirements, and present a spectrum of mechanisms to secure VC systems. We provide a solution that can be quickly adopted and deployed. Our progress towards implementation of our architecture, along with results on the performance of the secure VC system, are presented in the second paper. We conclude with an investigation, based on current results, of upcoming elements to be integrated in our secure VC architecture.

Abstract-Vehicular networks are a very promising technology to increase traffic safety and efficiency and to enable numerous other applications in the domain of vehicular communication. Proposed applications for VANETs have very diverse properties and often require non-standard communication protocols. Moreover, the dynamics of the network due to vehicle movements further complicates the design of an appropriate, comprehensive communication system. In this work, we collect and categorize envisioned applications from various sources and classify the unique network characteristics of vehicular networks. Based on this analysis, we propose five distinct communication patterns that form the basis of almost all VANET applications. Both the analysis and the communication patterns shall deepen the understanding of VANETs and simplify further development of VANET communication systems.

Vehicular Communication (VC) systems are on the verge of practical deployment. Nonetheless, their security and privacy protection is one of the problems that have been tackled only recently. In order to show the feasibility of secure VC, implementations are required. In [8] we have discussed the design of a VC security system that has emerged as a result of the European SeVeCom project. In this second paper, we discuss various issues related to the implementation and deployment aspects of secure VC systems. Moreover, we provide an outlook on open security research issues, which will arise as VC systems develop from today's simple prototypes to full-fledged systems.

ne of the major goals of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) is to support traffic safety. Cooperative awareness applications require frequent and low-delay information exchange among vehicles, including data such as current position, movement, and acceleration. This is realized by broadcasting socalled (single-hop) beacon messages. As a result, every vehicle is aware of other vehicles within a certain range. Beaconing is also the basic supporting process that enables geographic routing and message dissemination. However, this also requires a significant amount of bandwidth. The higher the frequency and thus the accuracy, the higher the bandwidth consumption.The first phase of research on VANETs has set the boundary conditions in terms of basic communication protocols and routing paradigms. Communication in VANETs will be based on IEEE 802.11p. Message dissemination and routing are based on geocast principles. Beaconing takes place on a single communication channel (commonly referred to as the control channel) that is shared by all nodes.However, it has also been shown in [1] that the limited bandwidth of the wireless channel has a severe impact on the efficiency of the communication. This means that if the beacon rate is fixed, channel load may increase too much in scenarios with high vehicle density. High channel utilization increases the information loss as packets are received erroneously, which is especially observed at large distances between sender and receiver.Simply reducing the beacon rate is not a suitable solution because it reduces the information quality at the same time. The error between the real position of a vehicle and the last known position retrieved from a beacon increases as the beacon rate is reduced. This results in position inaccuracies, which may disturb correct operation of active safety applications, which rely on accurate and up-to-date information.Currently, there is no final recommendation for a particular static beacon rate. No upper boundary in terms of maximum channel load has been specified. Furthermore, no requirements from the different applications have yet been clearly defined. As a consequence, even minimum and maximum beacon rate are hard to derive as these two boundaries have to satisfy all imaginable road traffic situations.In this article we pave the way for further enhancements of beaconing algorithms for the second phase of research on VANETs. After a short assessment of the current state of the art, we present a detailed analysis of the problem space and how different beacon rates influence 1) the offered load to the channel and 2) the resulting average and maximum accuracy of information Based on this problem evaluation, we motivate a flexible approach to control both appropriately. For this purpose, we propose a situation adaptive beaconing process that adapts the beacon rate continuously. The design space and different candidates for such an algorithm are introduced in this article. AbstractIn the future intervehicle communication will make driving safer, easier...

Abstract-Inter-vehicle communication is regarded as one of the major applications of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). Compared to MANETs, these so called vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have special requirements in terms of node mobility and position-dependent applications, which are well met by geographic routing protocols. Functional research on geographic routing has already reached a considerable level, whereas security aspects have been vastly neglected so far. Since position dissemination is crucial for geographic routing, forged position information has severe impact regarding both performance and security.In this work, we first analyze the problems that may arise from falsified position data. Then, in order to lessen these problems, we propose detection mechanisms that are capable of recognizing nodes cheating about their location in position beacons. In contrast to other position verification approaches, our solution does not rely on special hardware or dedicated infrastructure. Evaluation based on simulations shows that our position verification system successfully discloses nodes disseminating false positions and thereby widely prevents attacks using position cheating.

Inter-vehicle communication is regarded as one of the major applications of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). Compared to other MANETs, these so called vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have special requirements in terms of node mobility and position-dependent applications, which are well met by geographic routing protocols. Functional research on geographic routing has already reached a considerable level, whereas security aspects have been vastly neglected so far. Since position dissemination is crucial for geographic routing, forged position information has severe impact regarding both performance and security.In order to lessen this problem, we propose a detection mechanism that is capable of recognizing nodes cheating about their position in beacons (periodic position dissemination in most single-path geographic routing protocols, e.g. GPSR). Unlike other proposals described in the literature, our detection does not rely on additional hardware or special nodes, which contradicts the ad hoc approach. Instead, this mechanism uses a number of different independent sensors to quickly give an estimation of the trustworthiness of other nodes' position claims without using dedicated infrastructure or specialized hardware.The simulative evaluation proves that our position verification system successfully discloses nodes disseminating false positions and thereby widely prevents attacks using position cheating.

Inter-vehicle communication is regarded as one of the major applications of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). In these so called vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) security and privacy are crucial factors for successful deployment. In a scenario, where each vehicle would have a unique identifier, eavesdroppers could easily accumulate location profiles. As a solution approach, several authors suggest using changeable pseudonyms as temporary vehicle identifiers. If a vehicle changes its pseudonym from time to time, long-term tracking can be avoided. However, as we show in this paper, changing identifiers has detrimental effects on routing efficiency and increases packet loss. So, designers of VANET systems need to aim for a balance between privacy protection on the one and performance on the other hand. The results of this paper provide advise on how to achieve this balance.

SummaryInter-vehicle communication is regarded as one of the major applications of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). Compared to MANETs or wireless sensor networks (WSNs), these so-called vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have unique requirements on network protocols. The requirements result mainly from node mobility and the demands of position-dependent applications. On the routing layer, those requirements are well met by geographic routing protocols. Functional research on geographic routing has already reached a considerable level, whereas security aspects have only been recently taken into account. Position information dissemination has been identified as being crucial for geographic routing since forged position information has severe impact regarding both performance and security.In this work, we first summarize the problems that arise from falsified position data. We then propose a framework that contains different detection mechanisms in order to mitigate or lessen these problems. Our developed mechanisms are capable of recognizing nodes cheating about their position in beacons (periodic position dissemination in most single-path geographic routing protocols, e.g., GPSR). Unlike other proposals described in the literature, our detection system does not rely on additional hardware or special nodes, which would contradict the ad hoc approach. Instead, we use a number of different independent sensors to quickly give an estimation of the trustworthiness of other nodes' position claims. The different sensors run either autonomously on every single node, or they require cooperation between neighboring nodes.The simulation evaluation proves that the combination of autonomous and cooperative position verification mechanisms successfully discloses most nodes disseminating false position information, and thereby widely prevents attacks using position cheating.