Trustworthy Vehicular Communication Employing Multidimensional Diversification for Moving-target Defense

Enabling trustworthy Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) communication given the wireless medium and the highly dynamic nature of the vehicular environment is a hard challenge. Eavesdropping and signal jamming in such highly dynamic environment is a real problem. This paper proposes a nature inspired multidimensional Moving-Target Defense (MTD) that employs real time spatiotemporal diversity to obfuscate wireless signals against attacker reach. In space: the mechanism manipulates the wireless transmission pattern and configuration to confuse eavesdroppers. In Time: we manipulate the transmission payload, by intentionally injecting some fake data into the real transmission. Further, the mechanism changes the data transmission granularity over time from fine to coarse grained data chunks. As a case study, we assumed the direct transmission model across dynamic multi-paths relayed communication via vehicles traveling on a multi-lane road. The system is evaluated based on a complete analysis of the system model and comprehensive simulated scenarios. Results showed the effectiveness of the presented approach with an increased confusion factor, a massive reduction in the intercept probability and clear increase in the channel secrecy. © 2019. the Author(s). All Rights Reserved.