Implementation of security services for vehicular communications

Abstract

Over the last years, there has been a considerable development in the field of vehicular communications (VC) so as to satisfy the requirements of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). Standards such as IEEE 802.11p and ETSI ITS-G5 enable the so called Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs). Vehicles can exploit VANETs to exchange information, such as alerts and awareness information, so as to improve road safety. However, due to the expected popularity of ITS, VANETs could be prone to attacks by malicious sources. To prevent this, security standards, such as IEEE 1609.2, are being developed for ITS. In this work, an implementation of the required cryptographic algorithms and protocols for the transmission of secure messages according to the IEEE 1609.2 standard is presented. The implemented security protocols are then integrated into an existing WAVE-based system and tested in a real scenario to evaluate the performance impact on safety-related communications, in particular, the overhead that is caused by the process to sign/verify a digital message.