Impact of Vehicular Communications Security on Transportation Safety

TL;DR

This paper examines whether secure vehicular communication systems can be practical for transportation safety by analyzing their reliability, processing overhead, and impact on safety applications, finding that with proper design they can be as effective as unsecured systems.

Contribution

It provides an analysis of the practicality of secure VC systems, addressing communication reliability, processing overhead, and safety application impact, which was previously underexplored.

Findings

Secure VC can be practical with high processing power.

Proper system design ensures effectiveness comparable to unsecured VC.

Security mechanisms do not necessarily compromise safety application performance.

Abstract

Transportation safety, one of the main driving forces of the development of vehicular communication (VC) systems, relies on high-rate safety messaging (beaconing). At the same time, there is consensus among authorities, industry, and academia on the need to secure VC systems. With specific proposals in the literature, a critical question must be answered: can secure VC systems be practical and satisfy the requirements of safety applications, in spite of the significant communication and processing overhead and other restrictions security and privacy-enhancing mechanisms impose? To answer this question, we investigate in this paper the following three dimensions for secure and privacy-enhancing VC schemes: the reliability of communication, the processing overhead at each node, and the impact on a safety application. The results indicate that with the appropriate system design, including sufficiently high processing power, applications enabled by secure VC can be in practice as effective as those enabled by unsecured VC.