Secure Inter-Vehicle Communication: A Need for Evolution of VANET Towards the Internet of Vehicles

Abstract

This chapter elaborates on secure inter-vehicle communication which is a need for future evolution of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANET) towards the Internet of Vehicles (IoV). A vehicle disseminates messages among other vehicles in a VANET, whereas, in the IoV paradigm, each vehicle is considered as a smart object equipped with a powerful multi-sensor platform, communication technologies, computation units, IP-based connectivity to the Internet, and connectivity to other vehicles either directly or indirectly. The inter-vehicle communication is a key element of IoV to enable interactions between intra-vehicle components: vehicle to vehicle, vehicle to road, and between vehicles and people. The most important feature of inter-vehicle communication is to improve road traffic safety and efficiency by preventing unauthorized message injection and message alteration in the network. As communication among vehicles is based on VANET, this chapter identifies and revokes unauthentic and misbehaving vehicles from vehicular ad hoc network for secure inter-vehicle communication. The chapter is developed in two phases. The schemes in the first phase of work identify the authentic vehicles, whereas the schemes in the second phase identify and revoke misbehaving vehicles from the set of authentic vehicles as identified in the first phase of work in the vehicular ad hoc network.