Wireless Security in Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks: a Survey

Vehicular communications face unique security issues in wireless communications. While new vehicles are equipped with a large set of communication technologies, product life cycles are long and software updates are not widespread. The result is a host of outdated and unpatched technologies being used on the street. This has especially severe security impacts because autonomous vehicles are pushing into the market, which will rely, at least partly, on the integrity of the provided information. We provide an overview of the currently deployed communication systems and their security weaknesses and features to collect and compare widely used security mechanisms. In this survey, we focus on technologies that work in an ad-hoc manner. This includes LTE-PC5, WAVE, ITS-G5, and Bluetooth. First, we detail the underlying protocols and their architectural components. Then, we list security designs and concepts, as well as the currently known security flaws and exploits. Our overview shows the individual strengths and weaknesses of each protocol. This provides a path to interfacing separate protocols while being mindful of their respective limitations.