An Implementation of Shared Key Generation Extracted from Received Signal Strength in Vehicular Ad-Hoc Communication

Security in the vehicular ad-hoc networks currently has become a very important issue that has to be considered along with many applications related to vehicular networks deployment. This challenge grows up because the engagement of embedded systems be the main equipment in vehicles' on-board units (OBUs). OBU may communicate with each other or vehicle-to-vehicle and interact with equipments installed on the road side units (RSUs). This fact formalizes a new trend of threats and attacks in the vehicular networks to fully exploit and control transportation systems. Therefore, a security system in this network should be necessarily implemented. In this paper, we propose an implementation of shared key generation extracted from received signal strength (RSS) in the wireless communication between two authorized vehicles incorporated with symmetric cryptosystem to realize a security system which able to keep the confidentiality and integrity of the exchange information. We adopted several algorithms to enhance the correlation of RSS values between these two vehicles, increase key generation rate (KGR), and reduce key disagreement rate (KDR). The secrecy of the key is also ensured to pass the National Institute of Standard and Technology (NIST) statistical test suite.