A secure cluster‐based architecture for certificates management in vehicular networks

Abstract

International audienceIn this paper, we propose a distributed and dynamic public key infrastructure for vehicular ad hoc networks. We aim to achieve the fundamental security requirements, particularly the authentication, the confidentiality, and a reliable vehicle-to-vehicle data exchange. To make the certification authority (CA) reachable by all vehicles, we distribute its role among a set of dynamically elected vehicles. The election of dynamic CAs is based on a clustering algorithm where the cluster heads will be CAs in their clusters. The cluster heads are elected following two criteria: security and mobility. Due to the important role of the CA in each cluster and to protect it from DOS attacks, we introduce a VANETs dynamic demilitarized zone for vehicular ad hoc networks. Its role is to handle the certification requests sent to the CA from unknown vehicles, and hence, it avoids compromising it. Additionally, we detail the certificates management in the proposed public key infrastructure, and we propose a mechanism to provide anonymous vehicle-to-vehicle communications using pseudonyms. To study the feasibility of our distributed architecture and particularly the clustering algorithm, we propose a probabilistic model considering the speed of vehicles and taking into account the safety distance between vehicles. We carried out a set of simulations to evaluate the performance of the proposed clustering algorithm in both urban and highway environments. Hence, we study the effects of the transmission range, the speed of vehicles, and the number of trusted vehicles in the network on the stability and the efficiency of the overall proposed architecture. We also study some delays characterizing the certificates management. Our simulation results show that the security of the proposed architecture closely depends on the number of trusted vehicles in the network, and the stability depends on the mobility of vehicles on the road and on the total number of trusted vehicles

Security and Privacy in Vehicular Ad Hoc Network and Vehicle Cloud Computing: A Survey

“…An attacker can be a cloud member which can attack the user, i.e., in the traffic safety and management applications. To overcome this issue several works have been proposed in VANETs [120,121]. e main aim of VC is established, in which the member can join and leave the cloud anytime in the dynamic trustworthiness mechanism [29].…”

“…Malicious nodes refer to the nodes which affect the performance of the vehicular network such as VANETs and VC. In the VANETs, several research works have been proposed to deal with these issues [86,121]. Also, several methods are proposed to detect the malicious node in the VC [122,123].…”

Secure Clustering in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

“…Along with dynamic certification registration authorities and sub cluster heads were also involved in this mechanism. Reference [21] was the extension of [17] as in [17] the issue was detected during the election of certification authorities in which denial of service was occurring. The issue was solved in [21] using VANET dynamic demilitarized zone that would handle the certificate request from the unknown vehicles and prohibit malicious communication between certification authority and nodes.…”

“…Reference [21] was the extension of [17] as in [17] the issue was detected during the election of certification authorities in which denial of service was occurring. The issue was solved in [21] using VANET dynamic demilitarized zone that would handle the certificate request from the unknown vehicles and prohibit malicious communication between certification authority and nodes. Its additional feature was that each vehicle which was at 1-hop from other vehicles sent hello messages, as result the nodes which received that message saved the each and every record of the vehicle and thus response with a joint message to that node.…”

“…If a node left a cluster, the Sub cluster head was responsible for adding that node into another cluster on the basis of its trust level. In [21] a concept of dynamic key distribution was observed in which there were multiple central certificate authorities present at their respective geographical areas and an asymmetric key distribution algorithm was used. All the vehicles had to pass from VANET dynamic demilitarized zone to request a certificate from a certificate authority.…”