DoS attack on VANET routing and possible defending solutions - A survey

Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET), an unplanned network formed by vehicles on the road to improve road safety and driving conditions. Today, the vehicle count increases and the roads are becoming more hazardous by the effect of congestion and increased the likelihood of collision. Safety messages are to be routed to the vehicles in timely and correct manner. Because of the wireless medium, VANET messages are vulnerable to many attacks. To be secure, network availability must be obtained at all times since availability of the network is severely needed when a node sends any life critical information to other nodes. In this respect, the network availability is exposed to many types of attacks. In this paper, Denial of Service (DoS) attack on network availability is presented and its extremity level in VANET environment is elaborated. This paper also classifies and summarizes the techniques to prevent DoS attack with its pros and cons. From the survey, PBA technique is found to be good on authenticating vehicles with minimum delay and packet loss. Finally, we explore the significance of cellular automata in authenticating vehicles with lightweight operation that further reduces the delay with strong security.