Wireless communication systems -- Security measures

This work presents the implementation of the the IEEE 1609.2 WAVE Security
Services Standard. This implementation provides the ability to generate a message
signature, along with the capability to verify that signature for wave short messages
transmitted over an unsecured medium. Only the original sender of the message can sign
it, allowing for the authentication of a message to be checked. As hashing is used during
the generation and verification of signatures, message integrity can be verified because a
failed signature verification is a result of a compromised message. Also provided is the
ability to encrypt and decrypt messages using AES-CCM to ensure that sensitive
information remains safe and secure from unwanted recipients. Additionally this
implementation provides a way for the 1609.2 specific data types to be encoded and
decoded for ease of message transmittance. This implementation was built to support the
Smart Drive initiative’s VANET testbed, supported by the National Science Foundation
and is intended to run on the Vehicular Multi-technology Communication Device
(VMCD) that is being developed. The VMCD runs on the embedded Linux operating
system and this implementation will reside inside of the Linux kernel.

The open nature of the wireless medium makes the wireless communication
susceptible to eavesdropping attacks. In addition, fading and shadowing significantly
degrade the performance of the communication system in the wireless networks. A
versatile approach to circumvent the issues of eavesdropping attacks while exploiting the
physical properties of the wireless channel is the so-called physical layer-security. In this
work, we consider a model in which two legitimate users communicate in the presence of
an eavesdropper. We investigate the performance of the wireless network at the physical
layer that is subject to a variety of fading environments that may be modeled by the
Rayleigh, Nakagami-m, and Generalized-K distributions, to mention a few. We use the
secrecy outage probability (SOP) as the standard performance metrics to study the
performance of the wireless networks. We propose two different approaches to compute
the secrecy outage probability, and derive explicit expressions for the secrecy outage probability that allow us to characterize the performance of the wireless networks.
Specifically, we use a direct integration approach as well as a Taylor series base approach
to evaluate the secrecy outage probability. Finally, we use computer simulations, based
on MATLAB, to confirm the analytical results.