Samah Mansour

A Lightweight Message Authentication Framework in the Intelligent Vehicles System

--------------------------------------------------------ABSTRACT----------------------------------------------------------Intelligent Vehicles System (IVS) supports a wide variety of Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS) services such as vehicle visibility detection. In implementing this service, the message authentication is a vital design parameter that protects victim vehicles from being tricked into accepting false messages as legitimate ones and make a false decision based on the incoming message. However, implementing message authentication service is too expensive especially if vehicles, initially, don’t trust each others or there is no certificate of authority in place. In this research, we investigate the use of the Basic Safety Message (BSM) behavior over time as a metric to allow a receiving vehicle to anticipate at what distance it will continue to receive BSMs from within-range vehicles. Therefore, the victim vehicle would reject the BSM messages that fall outside its acceptance window. Simulation experiments are setup to study the realistic behavior of the BSM messages in different environment characteristics including changing the vehicle size, number of road lanes and vehicle speed. Research findings suggested that the lightweight message authentication can assist vehicles in estimating the duration for a trusted relationship among those that are located within range of each others.