A Secret Key Extraction Technique Applied in Vehicular Networks

Vehicular Ad hoc network (VANET) is an emerging technology that supports several applications related to safety and comfort. Its life saving characteristic has attracted the industry and research communities while its mobility, lack of infrastructure and serving wide spectrum of applications make it vulnerable to several kinds of attacks. VANET applications have stringent security requirements, as they affect both road traffic and safety. Many ordinary networks security solutions can be applied to provide security services in VANET, however the common problem among all of these solutions is the key sharing between legitimate vehicles. In this paper using the special characteristics and the randomness inherent of the wireless channel, a secret key extraction technique applied in VANET is proposed. We conduct extensive simulation to evaluate the proposed approach. Our simulation results show that the extracted key approach can be adjusted to extract either high or low rate key with high entropy rate and minimum information exchange between the legitimate vehicles. The extracted secret key can be successfully used to support several VANET´s security systems.