DRiVe: Detecting Malicious Roadside Units in the Internet of Vehicles With Low Latency Data Integrity

The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) may enhance road safety, improve traffic flow, etc. However, Internet-connected intelligent vehicles (IVs) are vulnerable to cyber-attacks. One of the important challenges in IoV is thus, verifying data integrity with strict latency requirements. The conventional way of providing data integrity in the Internet cannot be applied to IoV due to excessive overhead and latency. Therefore, most commercially available IVs do not use any security mechanisms for delay-sensitive traffic. However, if a road side unit (RSU) has been compromised, it can tamper with the data sent or received by IVs. To solve this issue, this article presents a light-weight mechanism called DRiVe to establish data integrity for the IVs and detect malicious RSUs. The DRiVe is based on a probabilistic model to identify malicious RSUs using specially constructed authentication techniques. The authentication parameters are only sent when a vehicle leaves the coverage area of one RSU and enters that of another. DRiVe does not employ any computationally intensive cryptographic primitives. This significantly reduces the security overhead introduced by sending message authentication codes (MACs) with each packet. A security and performance analysis shows that DRiVe can not only identify malicious RSUs effectively but can do so without introducing any significant communication overhead or latency. The proposed scheme reduces the number of bits transmitted by approximately 7% and decreases the latency incurred by 7.5%. For the scenario where malicious vehicles are present, the proposed scheme achieves a probability of detection close to 99%.