Exploiting the Randomness Inherent of the Channel for Secret Key Sharing in Vehicular Communications

Abstract

Vehicular Ad Hoc networks (VANETs) have been employed in supporting several applications related to safety and comfort. VANET applications have strict security requirements, as they have direct impact on people comfort and safety. Although many ordinary networks security systems can be applied to provide security services in VANET, the key establishment between legitimate vehicles is the common challenge among all of these systems. This paper proposes a secret key establishment technique for vehicular communications exploiting the special properties and randomness inherent of the wireless channel. Our comprehensive simulations show that the proposed key extraction technique suits VANETs rather than other communication systems, owing to the multi environments operation of VANET which causes more randomness due to fading, noise multipath and velocity variation. The proposed approach can be tuned to extract low or high rate secret key with high entropy rate and less information exchange between legitimate vehicles. The extracted secret key can be employed to support providing security services in VANET.