VANet security challenges and solutions: A survey
Introduction
VANET aims to insure safe drive by improving the traffic flow and therefore significantly reducing the car accidents. The latter is solved by providing appropriate information to the driver or to the vehicle. Still, any alteration of this real-time information may lead to system failure impacting people safety on the road. To insure its smooth functioning, securing this information becomes a must and hence it is on the top outlook of security researchers.
VANET is a special class of mobile ad-hoc network with predefined routes (roads). It relies on specific authorities for registration and management, Roadside units (RSUs) and On-Board units (OBUs). RSUs are widespread on the road edges to fulfill specific services and OBUs are installed in the vehicles navigating in VANET. All vehicles are moving freely on road network and communicating with each other or with RSUs and specific authorities.
Using DSRC (Dedicated Short Range Communication) in a single or multi-hop, the communication mode is either V2V (Vehicle-to-Vehicle), V2I (Vehicle-to-Infrastructure) or hybrid.
In the coming years, most of the vehicles in VANET will be equipped with on-board wireless device (OBU), GPS (Global Positioning System), EDR (Event Data Recorder) and sensors (radar and ladar) as shown in Fig. 1. These equipments are used to sense traffic congestions and status. Then automatically take appropriate actions in vehicle and relay this information through V2V or V2I within the vehicular network.
VANET users profit from many applications that are classified into active road safety, infotainment, traffic efficiency and management [1]; the latter stands for speed management and cooperative navigation.
The security is the state of being free from danger or threat. Security means safety, as well as the measures taken to be safe or protected. For example, in order to provide adequate security for the parade, town officials often hire extra guards.
In VANET, it is critical to guard against misuse activities and to well define the security architecture because it is a wireless communication which is harder to secure. The security and its guaranteed level of implementation affect people safety. Few years ago, many researchers have explored the security attacks and tried to find their related solutions. Others tried to define security infrastructures, or formalize standards and protocols. But still, the trend of trustworthiness of a node and misbehaving detection is large to explore.
This paper presents VANET security characteristics and investigates most of the VANET security challenges as well as the existing solutions in a comprehensive manner. After detailing the recent security architectures and the well-known security standards protocols, we present and discuss the recent frameworks that address the related issues. We focus on a novel classification of the different attacks known in the literature of VANET security and their solutions. Finally, despite all the promising opportunities that accompany VANET and after discussing the presented works, we have specified certain research challenges and open questions which may be future research directions. Thus enabling VANET to efficiently implement a system for trusting vehicles and protect it from malicious nodes.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: Section 2 expands VANET model and its security requirements. Section 3 details the attacker model. Section 4 presents the standardization efforts. Section 5 presents the solutions classified in a coherent manner. Section 6 expands the gap analysis. Section 7 highlights the emerging and open issues and we conclude in Section 8.
Section snippets
VANET characteristics
VANETs are ad hoc networks, highly dynamic, with little access to the network infrastructure and offering multiple services. The communication modes in VANET shown in Fig. 2 can be categorized into Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V), Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I) and Hybrid. In V2V, the used communication media is characterized by short latency and high transmission rate. This architecture is used in different scenarios of broadcasting alerts (emergency braking, collision, deceleration, etc.) or in a
Attacker model
The deployment of a security system for VANET is challenging. In fact, the highly dynamic nature with frequent disconnection, instantaneous arrivals and departures of vehicles, the usage of wireless channels to exchange emergency and safety messages, expose VANETs to various threats and attacks. In this section, we will classify the attacks, the attackers and analyze which VANET communication mode they affect.
Standardization efforts
An infrastructure is an underlying foundation for a system. Security architecture is a security design. It addresses the necessities and potential risks involved in a certain environment and specifies when and where to apply security controls. Standard provides detailed requirements on how a policy must be implemented. In VANET, many groups [12], [13], [14], [15], [16] have investigated the security architectures and infrastructures. They generated either security standard protocols [17], [21]
Proposed solutions from the literature to the previously described attacks
Many researchers worked on proposing solutions for the previously described attacks. We grouped these proposals based on the categorized attacks mentioned in section 3.1.
GAP analysis between different solutions
When performing a gap analysis in VANET, the aim is to identify gaps of missing/necessary needs in relation to what outcomes are desired. One must compare what has been done in the area, and compare this to the ambitions of what to aim for. There will probably be a gap in-between, which in that case must be identified. When this identifying process is completed the analysis hopefully proposes a solution of how to fill the gap.
Researchers in VANET tried to bypass the scalability problems and
Emerging and open issues
Based on the security approaches presented in section 5, the researchers in VANET tried to bypass many constraints or vulnerabilities attacking the vehicular network. Although, many issues still open. We highlight below some of them which may become new research areas in the future:
- 1)
The trustworthiness evaluation of nodes participating in VANET and their misbehavior detection:
- i.
Evaluating the trustworthiness of a vehicle in VANET is an open problem. We mentioned above that any defection in the
- i.
Conclusion
Users want safety and security much more on the road as many people life end there, due to misbehaving and maliciously of others. Overcoming these problems requires more efforts in the future to reach a secure VANET environment. This paper presented an extensive overview of the most of VANET security challenges and their causes as well as the existing solutions in a comprehensive manner. We give the details of the recent security architectures and the well-known security standards and
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