A formal analysis of protocol-independent security threats in VANETs

Vehicular Ad Hoc networks (VANETs) are fast emerging as the dominant model for intelligent traffic control. In the recent years, increasing number of researchers investigated various privacy and security issues such as key management, identity and location based attacks etc. and suggested protocols to defend against these issues. In this paper, we use data centric approach and formal security models to identify protocol-independent security issues inherent in VANETs. In particular, we analyze how message latency can be exploited in time critical services such as collision warning, disaster alerts etc. We introduce the concept of Zero Barrier for time critical services and derive key conditions to be satisfied whenever a new protocol is considered.