Diversity-based Moving-target Defense for Secure Wireless Vehicular Communications

Secure and reliable vehicle to vehicle (V2V) communication is a challenging task, particularly due to the wireless medium and the highly dynamic nature of the vehicular environment. There is a need to ensure wireless communication security against eavesdropping and signal jamming in such a highly dynamic environment. This paper proposes a spatiotemporal diversity-based mechanism that employs real time diversity to induce Moving-Target Defense (MTD); a defense mechanism inspired by nature. The mechanism is based on enabling flexible signal manipulation such as runtime diversification to confuse eavesdroppers by transmitting data across dynamic multi-paths relayed through vehicles traveling on a multi-lane road. Simulation results show that it would be very complicated for a malicious user to eavesdrop on a meaningful portion of the signal or jam a targeted data stream.