A Robust Routing Protocol for Interconnected Vehicles through Symmetric Secret Key Exchange

The expansion of intelligent transportation systems (ITS) is driven by the demand for cutting-edge cyber-physical systems, applications prioritizing comfort, and specialized services designed for utilization in smart vehicles. The internet of vehicles (IoV), a crucial element of ITS, supports data communication like vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-anything (V2X). Ensuring the safety and security of passengers relies heavily on effective inter-vehicle communication. The network layer's routing protocols enable efficient data communication within the IoV, addressing its dynamic network topology. Existing literature has introduced various routing protocols, including topology-based, position-based, cluster-based, broadcast-based, and hybrid protocols, to navigate the dynamic network topology of IoV. The performance evaluation of these protocols considers parameters like security, throughput, packet delivery ratio, jitter, delay, and overhead. However, these protocols are susceptible to malicious attacks that compromise the integrity, confidentiality, and availability of network messages, potentially leading to accidents and degrading the system's performance. In this context, we propose a novel secure routing protocol called secure optimized link state routing protocol SecOLSR, which employs symmetric secret key exchange for connected vehicles, aiming to mitigate the aforementioned challenges. Our paper presents a comprehensive security analysis of SecOLsr in the IoV network and assesses its performance in terms of quality-of-service (QoS) parameters alongside existing state-of-the-art protocols.