Security in Cooperative Systems within Intelligent Transport Systems

Abstract: Vehicular Communication intends to improve the safety for humans as well as the traffic efficiency on the roads. Vehicular communication requires the vehicles to communicate wirelessly, which make them vulnerable to attacks such as intentional modification and injection of bogus messages in the transmitted data stream. It also opens possibilities for adversaries to violate privacy, e.g. by performing location tracking. System characteristics including the need for real-time communication, fast changing network topology and limited resources make it extremely challenging for researchers to develop a robust and secure solution. Current proposed security solutions for the Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) are not capable of handling all the security requirements and system constraints. Thus, in this thesis we explore further possibilities to fulfill security requirements and overcome system constraints of vehicular ad-hoc networks.