Resilient secure aggregation for vehicular networks

Innovative ways to use ad hoc networking between vehicles are an active research topic and numerous proposals have been made for applications that make use of it. Due to the bandwidth-limited wireless communication medium, scalability is one crucial factor for the success of these future protocols. Data aggregation is one solution to accomplish such scalability. The goal of aggregation is to semantically combine information and only disseminate this combined information in larger regions. However, the integrity of aggregated information cannot be easily verified anymore. Thus, attacks are possible resulting in lower user acceptance of applications using aggregation or, even worse, in accidents due to false information crafted by a malicious user. Therefore, it is necessary to design novel mechanisms to protect aggregation techniques. However, high vehicle mobility, as well as tight bandwidth constraints, pose strong requirements on the efficiency of such mechanisms. We present new security mechanisms for semantic data aggregation that are suitable for use in vehicular ad hoc networks. Resilience against both malicious users of the system and wrong information due to faulty sensors are taken into consideration. The presented mechanisms are evaluated with respect to their bandwidth overhead and their effectiveness against possible attacks.