Securing Vehicular Communications

Abstract

Initiatives to create safer and more efficient driving conditions have recently begun to draw strong support. Vehicular communications (VC) will play a central role in this effort, enabling a variety of applications for safety, traffic efficiency, driver assistance, and infotainment. For example, warnings for environmental hazards (e.g., ice on the pavement) or abrupt vehicle kinetic changes (e.g., emergency braking), traffic and road conditions (e.g., congestion or construction sites), and tourist information downloads will be provided by these systems.Vehicular networking protocols will allow nodes, that is, vehicles or roadside infrastructure units, to communicate with each other over single or multiple hops. In other words, nodes will act both as end points and routers, with vehicular networks emerging as the first commercial instantiation of the mobile ad hoc networking technology.The self-organizing operation and the unique features of VC are a double-edged sword: a rich set of tools are offered to drivers and authorities, but a formidable set of abuses and attacks becomes possible. Hence, the security of vehicular networks is indispensable, because otherwise these systems could make antisocial and criminal behavior easier, in ways that would actually jeopardize the benefits of their deployment. What makes VC security hard to achieve is the tight coupling between applications, with rigid requirements, and the networking fabric, as well as the societal, legal, and economical considerations. Solutions to this problem involve industry, governments, and academia, and can have a broad impact.In this article we are specifically concerned with the following problem: how to design and build vehicular communication protocols and systems that leave as little space as possible for misbehavior and abuse and, at the same time, remain resilient to ongoing attacks. We present an analysis of the vulnerabilities of vehicular networks and the salient challenges in securing their operation. Then we propose our architectural view of how VC can be secured, along with a brief (due to space limitations) overview of novel certificate revocation protocols tailored to the VC environment. Finally, we survey related works and discuss a few open issues in this emerging area of research. VULNERABILITIES AND CHALLENGES VULNERABILITIESAny wireless-enabled device that runs a rogue version of the vehicular communication protocol stack poses a threat. We denote such rogue devices deviating from the defined protocols as adversaries or attackers.The adoption of a variant of the widely deployed IEEE 802.11 protocol 1 by the vehicle manufacturers makes the attacker's task easier. And even possession of credentials cannot ensure alone the correct operation of the nodes. The effects of differing types of attackers (internal or external, rational or malicious, independent or colluding, persistent or random) can clearly differ. Here, rather than analyzing specific protocols, we are after a general exploration of VC vulnerabilities.Jamming -The jamm...

Defense against Sybil attack in the initial deployment stage of vehicular ad hoc network based on roadside unit support

“…Deploying a public key infrastructure for individual vehicles (VPKI) is the most common solution for defending against Sybil attack [22] [23].…”

“…This can contribute to a more fluent traffic, as well as the improved road safety by advance warning about accidents and specific threats to safety. The security considerations in VANETs [14][21] [22] [23] are of exceptionally high importance, as a malicious attacker can trigger traffic jams or even accidents by injecting false information in the system.…”

On Data-Centric Trust Establishment in Ephemeral Ad Hoc Networks

“…This allows them to include their time and location information in any outgoing reports. Source authentication, required to prevent Sybil attacks, is achieved by digital signatures according to both industrial and academic proposals [2], [21]. In this example, source authentication identifies the type of the report sender and enables the assignment of default trustworthiness, as explained in Sec.…”

A privacy aware and efficient security infrastructure for vehicular ad hoc networks

“…Most researchers ( [2,11,12]) propose a PKI solution, with anonymous or pseudonymous certificates issued by the CA. This solutions add digital signatures to each message and do not provide encryption of messages.…”