Exploiting the physical layer security for providing a simple user privacy security system for vehicular networks

Vehicular Ad hoc networks (VANETs) have recently attracted both industry and research communities as emerging technology that strongly support people safety and comfort. However, VANET is susceptible to various types of attacks due to the lack of permanent infrastructure, high mobility, and serving broad range of applications. In this paper a simple security system that can provide integrity and privacy for transferring sensitive information in VANET is presented. The developed system efficiently considers the utilization of the available communication bandwidth, the exploitation of the channel properties and the optimization of the speed of the encryption process. The proposed system utilizes the very limited bandwidth of VANET by exchanging small amount of information and employing high speed encryption method. Meanwhile, it provides a high security solution by using a very strong and well known symmetric key encryption method in conjunction with a very efficient key distribution technique. The proposed system utilizes symmetric cryptography systems for securing information transfer owing to their robustness and high speed, while it uses the unique location property of the legitimate vehicles for key generation and distribution. The randomness inherent of the wireless channel is exploited to extract the secret key. Moreover, SHA-1 algorithm is used to provide information integrity solution.