DoS-resilient cooperative beacon verification for vehicular communication systems

Abstract

Authenticated safety beacons in Vehicular Communication (VC) systems ensure awareness among neighboring vehicles. However, the verification of beacon signatures introduces significant processing overhead for resource-constrained vehicular On-Board Units (OBUs). Even worse in dense neighborhood or when a clogging Denial of Service (DoS) attack is mounted. The OBU would fail to verify for all received (authentic or fictitious) beacons. This could significantly delay the verifications of authentic beacons or even affect the awareness of neighboring vehicle status. In this paper, we propose an efficient cooperative beacon verification scheme leveraging efficient symmetric key based authentication on top of pseudonymous authentication (based on traditional public key cryptography), providing efficient discovery of authentic beacons among a pool of received authentic and fictitious beacons, and can significantly decrease waiting times of beacons in queue before their validations. We show with simulation results that our scheme can guarantee low waiting times for received beacons even in high neighbor density situations and under DoS attacks, under which a traditional scheme would not be workable.

HERMES: Scalable, Secure, and Privacy-Enhancing Vehicular Sharing-Access System

“…Beyond vehicle sharing security and privacy, vehicular communications security and privacy received extensive attention over the years [46], [87], [88]. Recent results focus, for example, on scalable systems, notably for credential management [46], [89], [90], pseudonymous certificates for vehicle tracking protection [91], and decentralized cooperative defenses [92], [93]. Moreover, Qi et al [94] proposed an enhanced scheme of [95], namely, DUBI, a decentralized and privacy-preserving usage-based insurance scheme built on the blockchain technology to address privacy concerns for pay-asyou-drive insurances using zero-knowledge proofs and smart contracts.…”

Authenticated time for detecting GNSS attacks

“…The creation and verification of a digital signature for each beacon would introduce significant overhead due to the relatively high beacon rate (≈ 10 beacon s −1 ). This would be costly for the APs and not sustainable for constrained mobile devices, enabling clogging or resource depletion Denial of Service (DoS) attacks [31].…”

Efficient Distribution of Key Chain Commitments for Broadcast Authentication in V2V Communications

“…It is computationally expensive to verify the broadcast messages and the scheme is vulnerable to denial of service attacks. The authors of [13] adopted periodic broadcasts of commitment keys at a fixed time intervals in their cooperative message verification scheme. However, they did not evaluate its performance and did not provide the time interval that should be used for the periodic distribution.…”