Secure Data Transmission and Modelling in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Data security is crucial to safety-related vehicular applications. Critical challenges of unstable topologies and the collisions of uncoordinated data transmissions arise, due to the mobile and distributed nature of vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs). We propose a new secure transmission protocol for VANETs, where the transmitter can adaptively switch between backing off transmissions to alleviate collisions, as well as changing keys, to increase success rate with matched keys. We also develop a new 3-dimensional (3-D) Markov model to characterize the protocol. Security analyses are carried out. Interesting insights and useful guidelines to adequately distribute keys among mobile vehicular nodes are also provided.