A Novel Infrastructure-Based Worm Spreading Countermeasure for Vehicular Networks

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), essential components of intelligent transportation systems, are attracting an increasing amount of interest in research and industrial sectors. As multifunctional mobile nodes that integrate transporting, sensing, information processing, and wireless communication capabilities, vehicular nodes are facing remarkable security issues and are more vulnerable to malware attacks than conventional communication nodes. In this paper, we examine the behaviors and security concerns relating to worm spreading in VANETs. We discuss various approaches for worm spreading in VANETs, and propose an infrastructure-based worm containment (IBWC) strategy. The IBWC problem is modeled as a minimum contamination problem by introducing the expected contamination degree. The simplified Greedy method is then proposed to solve the minimum expected contamination degree problem on road networks. Simulation results show that the proposed method outperforms the existing greedy method and the max-flow based method from both complexity and solution quality aspects.