Secure Message Dissemination in Vehicular Networks: A Topological Approach

Abstract

Secure message dissemination is an important issue in vehicular networks, especially considering the vulnerability of vehicle to vehicle (V2V) message dissemination to malicious attacks. Traditional security mechanisms, largely based on message encryption and key management, can only guarantee secure message exchanges between known source and destination pairs. For secure message dissemination in vehicular networks against insider attackers, who may tamper the content of the disseminated messages, ensuring the consistency and integrity of the transmitted messages becomes a major concern that traditional message encryption and key management based approaches fall short to address. In this paper, by incorporating the underlying network topology information, we propose a novel heuristic decision algorithm that enables a vehicle to make a decision on the message content using minimal information readily available. The proposed algorithm can be readily implemented in practice. Simulations are conducted to compare the security performance achieved by the proposed decision algorithm with that achieved by existing ones that do not consider or only partially consider the topological information, to establish the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. Our results show that by incorporating the network topology information, the security performance can be significantly improved. This work sheds light on the optimum algorithm design for secure message dissemination in vehicular networks.