Security-Aware Ad Hoc Networking Protocol for Vehicular Safety Systems

Modern cars are implemented with a number of environmentally-aware safety systems, from radar-induced braking, to oncoming-vehicle detecting headlight controls. Similarly, with the dawn of semi and fully-autonomous vehicles, cars themselves are being equipped with an even wider range of sensors and are able to respond to more stimuli than ever. In this world, inter-vehicular information sharing and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication to exchange road-safety related message is of paramount importance. At the same time, message exchange should conform to standard security goals of authentication, integrity and anonymity. Our proposed system uses a bandwidth-efficient communication protocol which prioritizes message retransmissions by other participating vehicles in a manner that results in low latency and propagation over a wider area on the roadway. Communication between vehicles and RSUs is being protected by pseudo IDs and Hadamard matrix credentials for each vehicle and RSU.