A secure alert messaging system for safe driving

Vehicular safety is an emergent application in inter-vehicular communications. As this application is based on fast multi-hop message propagation, including information such as position, direction, and speed, it is crucial for the data exchange system of the vehicular application to be resilient to security attacks. To make vehicular networks viable and acceptable to consumers, we have to design secure protocols that satisfy the requirements of the vehicular safety applications. The contribution of this work is threefold. First, we analyze the vulnerabilities of a representative approach named Fast Multi-hop Algorithm (FMBA) to the position cheating attack. Second, we devise a fast and secure inter-vehicular accident warning protocol which is resilient against the position cheating attack. Finally, an exhaustive simulation study shows the impact of the attack on the protocol FMBA on delaying the transmission of alert messages. Furthermore, we show that our secure solution is effective in mitigating the position cheating attack. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.