Towards Secure IoT: Securing Messages Dissemination in Intelligent Traffic Systems

TL;DR

This paper proposes a lightweight security protocol for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) in intelligent traffic systems, enabling secure, fast communication during high mobility scenarios by inheriting security keys across base stations.

Contribution

It adapts sensor network security protocols to VANETs, reducing cryptographic overhead and enabling quick authentication as vehicles move between network zones.

Findings

Secure communication achieved in VANET simulations

Protocol reduces cryptography computation overhead

Fast vehicle authentication across network zones

Abstract

A few years ago, Automotive area in the IoT was seen as theoretical concept and today we are already seeing the possibilities of not only driverless cars, but applications of IoT in the intelligent vehicles including parking, maintaining environment, protecting lives and smoothing the flow vehicle movements. We have realized the urgent need of using simple and efficient secure protocol in Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) to be practical in the fast mobility of the network nodes, and taking advantage of the existence of base stations gateways along the road to inherit the protocol to different VANETs, this will reduce the initialization of communication overhead time and the security keys initialization each time a node passes to new base station zone. In this research, we applied security protocol used in sensor networks to achieve security in VANET, the simulation analysis shows that secure practical communication is achieved which can be inherited to other sub VANETs. The contribution of this article is enhancing proposed protocols with as less cryptography computation overhead as possible to make it applicable in the high mobility nature of VANET using security primitives; which guarantees security while allowing fast authenticating during vehicle passing one VANET to the next one depending on its direction in the transportation networks.