Security Evaluation of Data Dissemination in Inter-Vehicle Networks

In the past decade, Vehicular Communication (VC) has been a main subject of research in the Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSs); particularly, with many emerging communication technologies such as DSRC and cellular networks. Through the exchange of messages in a timely manner, these networks are anticipated to improve ITS functionality and driving experience on roads. Several dissemination algorithms have been created in order to achieve high accuracy and efficiency while minimizing redundant transmissions in VC networks. However, recent cyberattacks on automobiles have introduced cybersecurity as a new dimension in the performance of dissemination protocols. In this paper, delay-based, probability-based, and flooding-based dissemination algorithms are compared in terms of performance them evaluated against different types of cyberattacks using NS-3 and SUMO. According to the results, delay-based dissemination performs better than probability- and flooding-based dissemination in terms of network load, and hop count, for single and multiple packet transmissions. However, probability-based dissemination had superior performance over the delay-based dissemination by around 60% in terms of end-to-end delay. From security perspective, flooding, delay-, and probability-based algorithms had no defense against message falsification and Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, due to the lack of a content verification procedures. Yet, in position falsification attack, the number of relay nodes increased by 70% and the network load increased by 62.2% in both DBD and PBD.