Securing VANETs: industry approaches and current research directions

Security plays a critical role in Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs). In the absence of secure mechanisms, malicious parties could inject bogus information, at best robbing VANETs of their safety benefits or at worst causing accidents. Unfortunately, VANETs pose unique new research challenges, preventing the use of existing network security mechanisms.

Industry has proposed security mechanisms to safeguard VANET operations. In this talk, we will discuss the properties and limitations of these mechanisms and present remaining research challenges.

We will then present promising proposed research mechanisms to secure VANETs beyond current industry standards, such as the application of advanced cryptographic techniques to provide anonymity, the use of trusted computing technologies such as the Trusted Computing Group's (TCG's) Trusted Platform Module (TPM), or the use of location verification. We conclude the talk with remaining open research challenges, as well as opportunities and directions for addressing these challenges.