A Survey: Engineering Challenges to Implement VANET Security

VANET (Vehicle Ad-hoc Network, i.e., V2V (Vehicle-to-Vehicle) communication) with short communication latency and not needing an infrastructure could play important roles in future road safety, to implement crash warning applications. VANET could be useful for awareness of vehicles in drivers' blind spots in situations that cannot be detected by cameras or radars. However, VANET has additional security difficulties to detect and exclude vehicles that are malicious nodes from the network, besides wireless communication's inherent security vulnerabilities, such as jamming, eavesdropping, and tampering, because nodes are communicating with each other directly and not through a base station or a server. On the other hand, DLT (Distributed Ledger Technologies) typified by blockchain is planned to take important roles even in the auto industry, for example, to record/control the information of a huge number of components or maintenance/inspection histories. However, these technologies still have technical limitations to cover time sensitive safety-related applications provided by VANET. Hence, this report first introduces VANET and its security risks, then addresses blockchain's opportunities in the automotive industry. Finally, this report concludes by discussing technical challenges on blockchain to be applied for VANET, for example, the consensus process to create a new block and 51% issue.