In Inter-Vehicle Communication (IVC) networks, the high mobility and lack of infrastructure pose major challenges in designing secure routing protocols. In this work, we present a new secure routing protocol called SERVEN (SEcure Routing in VEhicular Networks) that can achieve near-instantaneous secure communication in IVC networks. In particular, we concentrate on the design of the network setup phase of the protocol and we present simulation results using Network Simulator version 2.28 (ns-2.28). Secure setup means the appropriate formation of a network whose nodes are aware of each other and of the right topology. This is especially important for location-based routing protocols in IVC networks.
TopSeveral secure routing protocols for Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs) have been proposed in the literature (Hubaux, et al., 2001; Marti, Giuli, Lai, & Baker. 2000; Zhou & Haas, 1999; Zapata, 2001; Kong, Zerfos, Luo, Lu, & Zhang, 2001; Papadimitratos & Haas, 2002; Hu, Johnson, & Perrig, 2002a; Hu, Perrig, & Johnson, 2002b; Sanzgiri, Dahill, Levine, Shields, & Royer, 2002; Eichler, Schwingenschlögl, Dötzer, & Eberspächer, 2004) with protection capabilities against only specific attacks in MANETs. Most of this previous work focuses on providing secure routing based on cryptographic operations, such as symmetric and asymmetric cryptography. Some approaches focus on distributing the certificate authority based on the fact that no one single node in an ad hoc network can be trusted, due to low physical security and availability (Zhou & Haas, 1999; Kong, et al., 2001). Marti, et al. (2000) and Buchegger, et al. (2002) focus on mitigating routing misbehavior by rating and isolating the nodes according to their behavior. A different approach is to provide incentive to nodes so that they properly relay user data by introducing the concept of fictitious currency (Buttyan & Hubaux, 2000). Yi, et al. (2001) propose an approach to routing that incorporates security levels of nodes into traditional routing metrics. The protection of the route discovery process is regarded as an additional Quality-of-Service (QoS) issue.