On Modeling and Understanding Vehicle Evacuation Attacks in VANETs

To secure a Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET), extensive studies have been conducted on developing authentication infrastructures, and identifying misbehaving vehicles. The effectiveness of such efforts heavily depends on the underlying communication network. However, information exchange in the VANET can be severely delayed because of its highly-dynamic and partially-connected topology. Such delay can be potentially exploited by attackers to cause physical impacts to the transportation system. In this paper, we propose and model a new attack, called vehicle evacuation attack, to investigate how the message delay endangers the trustworthiness in VANETs, and further causes physical impacts to cars on the road. Our study demonstrates that there exists a linear relationship between the delay of message dissemination and the impact of the vehicle evacuation attack, which can be used as a guideline on security, reliability, and safety design in real-world VANETs.