DEVELOPMENT AND ANALYSIS OF A SECURE AND EFFICIENT VEHICULAR AD HOC NETWORK

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) enable vehicles to communicate with each other by equipping every vehicle with an on board unit (OBU). Many interesting and promising functionalities can be achieved in the VANETs, such as safety related application and data downloading application. In this thesis, we focus on the security and privacy provision as well as efficiency improvement of above two applications in the VANETs. In the safety related application, each vehicle periodically broadcasts messages including its current position, direction and velocity (which can be generated by a global positioning system (GPS) device) to inform its geographic data to its neighbors. Privacy is an important issue in VANETs. Meanwhile, some important security functionalities such as message authentication, integrity and non-repudiation should be integrated into the VANETs. In this thesis, we propose a distributed key management protocol based on group signature to provide security and privacy for vehicles. Distributed key management is expected to facilitate the revocation of malicious vehicles, verification efficiency, maintenance of the system and heterogeneous security policies, compared with the centralized key management assumed by the existing group signature schemes. In our framework, each road side unit (RSU) acts as the key distributor for the group, where a new issue incurred is that the semi-trust RSUs may be compromised. Therefore, we develop security protocols which are able to detect compromised RSUs and their malicious accomplices. Moreover, we address the issue of large computation overhead due to the group signature implementation. A practical cooperative message authentication protocol (CMAP) is thus proposed to alleviate the verification burden for vehicles. In the CMAP, on average, each vehicle just needs to verify a very small amount of received geographic messages. Compared with the existing probabilistic verification protocol, CMAP can save at least 40 % computation resource for vehicles. In the data downloading application, we propose a secure cooperative data downx loading framework for payment services in VANETs. In our framework, vehicles download data when they pass by an RSU and then share the data after they travel out of the RSU’s coverage. A fundamental issue of our framework is how vehicles share data with each other. Thus, we develop an application layer data sharing protocol (DSP) in which vehicles share their downloaded data one by one in sequence according to their positions. A better performance can be achieved by the proposed protocol because it is able to avoid medium access control (MAC) layer collisions and the hidden terminal effect. Analytical models are derived to quantitatively evaluate the impact of the distance between RSUs on the amount of data that vehicles can download in a drive through. The simulation results show that our protocol can download 87.4% more data for vehicles than the existing scheme “VC-MAC” when the distance between two consecutive RSUs reaches 10 kilometers. Moreover, we also address security and privacy issues in the process of data downloading and sharing. Both applicants’ exclusive access to the applied data and vehicles’ privacy are ensured by our framework. Compared with the communication overhead in the intuitive method, the communication overhead in our framework will be reduced to 50%. We also propose a security protocol to detect sybil attacks in privacy preserved VANETs. In the above two applications, vehicles’ location information is utilized to facilitate the efficiency. However, if malicious vehicles launch the sybil attack by forging several fake entities and claim they are at some certain positions. The overall performance of the applications will be compromised greatly. So, we propose a security protocol to detect sybil attacks by examining the rationality of vehicles’ positions. The attack detection utilizes the characteristics of communication. No extra hardware and little communication and computation overhead will be introduced to vehicles. Moreover, a smart attacker scenario in which a malicious vehicle may adjust its communication range to avoid detection and the malicious vehicles’ collusion scenario are also considered.Ph.D. in Computer Engineering, July 201