Securing communication between service providers and road side units in a connected vehicle infrastructure

Road Side Units (RSUs) within the connected vehicle infrastructure are vulnerable to security and access control challenges. RSUs may share resources with unreliable SPs that could lead to information leakage due to an insecure messaging infrastructure. To mitigate these concerns, we introduce an automated service provision mechanism that enables a controlled messaging infrastructure using a Distributed Security Framework (DSF). Service provision is accomplished by providing RSUs with publish/subscribe brokers that enable authorized SPs to distribute their services as topics and define access rights through the DSF. The DSF acts as a secure middle layer that is hosted by fog computing nodes to ensure close proximity to RSUs, handles resource authorization (i.e., topic creation in specific brokers), and provides identity authentication of both RSUs and SPs. The DSF uses an attribute-based access control model to enable both SPs and RSUs to define and dynamically manage attribute-based access policies to cope with run-time changes of protection requirements. We validate the DSF framework in a simulated smart highway environment comprising interconnected RSUs and SPs to demonstrate our technique's effectiveness.