A Design and Evaluation of a Secure Neighborhood Awareness Framework for Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks

• Main Author: Abumansoor, Osama
• Language: en
• Published: 2014
• Subjects: Location information; Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET); Security
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10393/31171

Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) are envisioned to provide many road and safety applications that will improve drivers' awareness and enhance the driving experience. Many of proposed applications are location-based that depend on sharing the location information of vehicles and events among neighboring nodes. The location-based applications should provide vehicle operators with knowledge of the current surrounding conditions to help them make appropriate traveling decisions, such as avoiding traffic congestion. Drivers expect to receive accurate and reliable information from other vehicles. Therefore, securing localization service integrity is important to support a VANET's overall system reliability. In this thesis, we study the exchanged location information in VANETs and designed a framework to prevent potential security threats that will violate users' privacy and overcome limitations that can impact the exchanged data integrity and reliability. The solution developed a secure neighborhood awareness service and shared localization information management protocol in a VANET. The proposed framework is constructed through several components: (i) a location verification protocol that will secure location information by providing a non-line-of-sight (NLOS) verification protocol to overcome moving obstacle effects; (ii) privacy-preserving location information management to detect data inconsistency and provide a recovery process while preventing attackers from tracking individual vehicles; (iii) a trust model evaluation mechanism based on neighborhood awareness; (iv) an adaptive beacon protocol that will reduce the number of messages and provide quality of service(QoS) control for network managers and authorities. We also propose a security evaluation model that quantifies the security attributes for the localization service in a VANET. The model will help evaluate an integrated security measures that are provided by different components of the network services.