Inter-vehicular communications: Security and reliability issues

Inter-vehicular communication of future will have the potential to avoid some of the major problems of road travel, namely, collisions, traffic congestions, fuel consumption, emissions and the like. Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) when implemented, will make the largest implementation of ad-hoc networks. It has been observed that security of VANETs is of paramount importance, because malicious attacks can endanger human lives. Considerable research has been focused on enhancing the security of such networks via secure protocols designed for VANETs. This paper, in addition to discussing the existing security protocols, concentrates on ways to improve the intelligence of the decision system to enhance security and tackle spurious data, with the help of the physics of vehicle dynamics and historical data, which may be collected from various sensors like GPS, In-Vehicle Systems (IVS) and On-Road Assistance systems (ORA).