Efficient Authentication of Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) Safety Messages
Muhammad, Mujahid (2024) Efficient Authentication of Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) Safety Messages. Doctoral thesis, Birmingham City University.
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Mujahid Yahya Muhammad PhD Thesis published_Final version_Final Award Sept 2024.pdf - Accepted Version Download (2MB) |
Abstract
Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (C-ITS) extend traffic awareness beyond individual vehicles by enabling the exchange of information through messages shared among vehicles and roadside units (RSU) via direct vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) broadcast communications. This shared information is processed by safety applications, such as intersection collision warning systems, designed to detect and mitigate potentially dangerous situations. The aim is either to alert the vehicle driver or to take corrective action through the vehicle’s control system. Ensuring the authenticity and integrity of these messages is crucial, as acting on incorrect information could put human safety at risk. However, securing direct V2V/I safety messages poses challenges due to the strict performance requirements of safety applications (particularly low end-to-end message latency and reliable message delivery), the dynamic topology and large scale of the peer-to-peer network, and the high volume of message traffic that vehicles are expected to process.
Standards organisations and government transportation authorities recommend the use of digital signature schemes based on public key cryptography to authenticate and protect the integrity of messages. These require a vehicular public key infrastructure (VPKI) to manage certificates and deliver them to vehicles. The first research contribution of this thesis is to confirm, through theoretical modelling and realistic simulation, that performance issues inherent in the VPKI-based scheme, owing to the computational expense of asymmetric cryptography, result in message latency and dropped message frequency that exceed acceptable limits in moderate to high road traffic density situations. As an alternative, an approach derived from a symmetric cryptography-based protocol called Time Efficient Stream Loss-tolerant Authentication (TESLA) is proposed. We show that its performance is within the requirements of basic safety applications. Furthermore, it requires less infrastructure and administration.
Applying standard TESLA in the context of V2V, has its own challenges. One is the difficulty of distributing authentication information called commitments in the dynamic V2V environment. We identify two solutions to this problem (VAS-centric and Vehicle-centric) and show, through analysis and simulation, that up to 94% of commitments delivered to vehicles by the VAS are timely. The VAS-centric solution is preferred, except in areas where cellular network coverage is poor. A second challenge is the so-called authentication delay, a fixed latency overhead inherent to TESLA, found to be at least 12ms in the V2V context, and which results in poorer performance than the VPKI-based approach when message traffic is light. To address this, we propose a modified version of standard TESLA, called prompt verification (PV), which eliminates the authentication delay. Unfortunately, this is vulnerable to impersonation attacks in some circumstances. We devise and study a number of mitigations for this vulnerability, notably a method (RMCCS) for detecting inconsistencies between reported and actual vehicle positions that is based on the physical characteristics of transmission signals. This is employed in a hybrid approach (PV+TESLA), in which a selected minority of messages are subject to standard TESLA verification. Information from RMCCS and from other sources are factors influencing PV+TESLA’s decision on how many and which messages to verify with TESLA In experiments, PV+TESLA resulted in an 85% reduction in authentication delay, although there is a trade-off between reducing latency and increasing risk of accepting fake messages. RMCCS can also be applied independently to detect vehicles giving incorrect position information.
Item Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
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Dates: | Date Event 23 September 2024 Accepted |
Uncontrolled Keywords: | Vehicle-to-vehicle communications, intelligent transport system, safety applications, message security, safety messages, message authentication, message integrity, latency, message delay |
Subjects: | CAH11 - computing > CAH11-01 - computing > CAH11-01-01 - computer science |
Divisions: | Doctoral Research College > Doctoral Theses Collection Faculty of Computing, Engineering and the Built Environment > College of Computing |
Depositing User: | Jaycie Carter |
Date Deposited: | 22 Oct 2024 15:44 |
Last Modified: | 22 Oct 2024 15:44 |
URI: | https://www.open-access.bcu.ac.uk/id/eprint/15922 |
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