Classification of Distributed Denial of Service Attacks in VANET: A Survey

Vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is a self-organizing network established to provide wireless communication between vehicles where information plays an important role in aspects such as collision detection, re-routing, traffic monitoring, information related to gas stations, hospitals, hotels, entertainment, and more. The main challenges that VANET faces are security and privacy of information, which lead to a variety of attacks. Numerous types of attacks can be carried out on VANET, with distributed denial of service (DDOS) being one of the most common and dangerous. DDOS attacks on VANET result in the lack of availability of information for vehicles to communicate. Many methods were developed to counteract DDOS, however the efficacy of most of these existing systems was limited to some degree, and attackers exploited these weaknesses to conduct network attacks. Here we provide a full explanation of numerous DDOS attacks as well as a layer-by-layer classification of DDOS attacks that are specialized to specific layers or multi-layers. The goal of this survey is to provide useful information to fellow researchers on VANET attacks, in particular DDOS attacks, their layer-wise classification, the impact DDOS has on the network, and existing DDOS countermeasures, their limitations, and how they can be improved. We have referred to various journal papers to gather the information that can be helpful to researchers working in the field of VANET attacks.