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Exploiting the Randomness Inherent of the Channel for Secret Key Sharing in Vehicular Communications

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Abstract

Vehicular Ad Hoc networks (VANETs) have been employed in supporting several applications related to safety and comfort. VANET applications have strict security requirements, as they have direct impact on people comfort and safety. Although many ordinary networks security systems can be applied to provide security services in VANET, the key establishment between legitimate vehicles is the common challenge among all of these systems. This paper proposes a secret key establishment technique for vehicular communications exploiting the special properties and randomness inherent of the wireless channel. Our comprehensive simulations show that the proposed key extraction technique suits VANETs rather than other communication systems, owing to the multi environments operation of VANET which causes more randomness due to fading, noise multipath and velocity variation. The proposed approach can be tuned to extract low or high rate secret key with high entropy rate and less information exchange between legitimate vehicles. The extracted secret key can be employed to support providing security services in VANET.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Electronic and Optical Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing, 210094, China

    Abdeldime Mohamed Salih Abdelgader & Shu Feng

  2. Karary University, Khartoum, 12304, Sudan

    Abdeldime Mohamed Salih Abdelgader

  3. College of Computer and Information Science, Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University, FuZhou, 350002, China

    Shu Feng

  4. National Mobile Communications Research Laboratory, Southeast University, Nanjing, 210096, China

    Shu Feng

  5. School of Information Science and Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing, 210096, China

    Lenan Wu

Authors
  1. Abdeldime Mohamed Salih Abdelgader
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  2. Shu Feng
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  3. Lenan Wu
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Abdeldime Mohamed Salih Abdelgader.

Additional information

This work is supported in part by the open research fund of National Key Laboratory of Electromagnetic Environment (No.201500013), the open research fund of National Mobile Communications Research Laboratory, Southeast University (Grant No. 2013D02), and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grants No. 61271230, No.61472190 and No. 610011024).

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Salih Abdelgader, A.M., Feng, S. & Wu, L. Exploiting the Randomness Inherent of the Channel for Secret Key Sharing in Vehicular Communications. Int. J. ITS Res. 16, 39–50 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13177-017-0136-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13177-017-0136-4

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