Adaptive security mechanisms for safety applications in Internet of Vehicles

Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is an important constituent of next generation smart cities that enables city wide connectivity of vehicles for traffic management applications. A secure and reliable communications is an important ingredient of safety applications in IoV. While the use of a more robust security algorithm makes communications for safety applications secure, it could reduce application QoS due to increased packet overhead and security processing delays. Particularly, in high density scenarios where vehicles receive large number of safety packets from neighborhood, timely signature verification of these packets could not be guaranteed. As a result, critical safety packets remain unverified resulting in cryptographic loss. In this paper, we propose two security mechanisms that aim to reduce cryptographic loss rate. The first mechanism is random transmitter security level section whereas the second one is adaptive scheme that iteratively selects the best possible security level at the transmitter depending on the current cryptographic loss rate. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed mechanisms in comparison with the static security technique recommended by the ETSI standard.