A General Testing Framework Based on Veins for Securing VANET Applications

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) can make vehicles communicate with each other as well as roadside infrastructure units (RSUs) in order to increase transportation efficiency and road safety in smart city. VANET applications in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) include Traffic information systems, Road Transportation Emergency Services, On-The-Road Services, and so on. But more and more cyber threats can compromise these applications and limit our benefits, such as man-in-middle, spoofing and denial of service (DoS). Testing and securing VANET applications themselves is an important concern in ITS design and implementation. In this paper, we analyze security requirement and threat source of VANET applications, and then focus on providing a general testing framework based on Veins simulation platform to secure VANET applications. By use of this testing framework, a proof-of-concept example with malicious messages attack in an expressway tolling application over VANET is also given to demonstrate the testing framework effective and practicable. Experimental results of the example shows the testing framework is suitable for VANET security test, and the attacks will bring about 60.60% more total toll fees, 8.39% longer travel distances, and 43.63% more travel times. Consequently, we also give some countermeasures to improve the security of expressway tolling application. Finally challenges from combining the packet simulators into one framework, and limitations are reported and discussed.