Analysis of security approaches for vehicular ad-hoc networks

In the last years, the number of vehicles has increased up to a point where the road infrastructure cannot easily cope anymore, and congestion in cities becomes the norm rather then exception. Smart technologies are vastly employed to cope with advanced scheduling mechanisms - from intelligent traffic lights designed to control traffic, up to applications running inside the car to provide updated information to the driver, or simply keep him socially connected. The time for such smart technologies is right: the power of computation along with the memory size of microprocessors have increased, while price per computation, storage and networking power decreased. What few years ago might have sounded rather futuristic, like technologies designed to facilitate communication between cars and automate the exchange of data about traffic, accidents or congestion, is now becoming reality. But the implications of these ideas have only recently become relevant; in particular, security and trust-related implications are just now arising as critical topics for such new applications. The reason is that drivers face new challenges, from their personal data being stolen or applications being fed with false information about traffic conditions, to technology being exposed to all kind of hijacking attacks. A practitioner developing a smart traffic application is faced with an important problem: what security technology or algorithm to use to better cope with these challenges. In this paper, we first present an analysis of various cryptographic algorithms in the context of vehicular scenarios. Our scope is to analyze the designs and approaches for securing networks formed between vehicles. In particular, we are interested in the security layers able to provide strong cryptographic algorithms implementation that can guarantee high levels of trust and security for vehicular applications. The analysis exploits the realistic simulator being developed at the University Politehnica of Bucharest.