Denial of service attacks on inter-vehicle communication networks

Future safety systems will rely on the transmission of vehicle positions and kinematics through direct vehicle-to-vehicle wireless communication. The Wireless Access in Vehicular Environments (WAVE) standards, however, are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS) attacks which could significantly reduce the message delivery rate for these heartbeat messages. The WAVE standards were implemented in a simulation system in order to evaluate three different types of DoS attacks on these messages in a highway environment. These simulations show that the characteristics of the vehicular environments and heart-beat messages amplify the effect of these attacks, reducing the performance in the network in areas far from the attacking node. The amplification was due to the aggregate strength of the attacker's and legitimate node's signals. These combined signals reduced both the ability of nodes to receive messages clearly and the ability of nodes to detect that media is idle.