Date of Award
August 2020
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Science (MS)
Department
Electrical and Computer Engineering (Holcomb Dept. of)
Committee Member
Richard R Brooks
Committee Member
Lu Yu
Committee Member
Richard Groff
Abstract
Applications using dedicated short-range communication (DSRC) are being developed to prevent automobile accidents. Many DSRC implementations, applications and network stacks are not mature. They have not been adequately tested and verified. This study illustrates security evaluation of a DSRC wireless application in vehicular environments (DSRC/WAVE) protocol implementation. We set up a simulation of a working road safety unit (RSU) on real DSRC devices. Our experiments work on the Cohda testbed with DSRC application wsm-channel. We extended the functionality of wsm-channel, an implementation of WAVE short message protocol (WSMP) for broadcasting GPS data in vehicular communications, to broadcast car information and RSU instructions. Next we performed Denial of Service attacks to determine how few packets need to be dropped to cause automobile crashes. Hidden Markov Models (HMM) are constructed using sniffed side channel information, since operational packets would be encrypted. The inferred HMM tracks the protocol status over time. Simulation experiments test the HMM predictions showing that we were able to drop necessary packets using side channels. The attack simulation following timing side-channel worked best to drop necessary packets with 2.5 % false positive rate (FPR) while the attack following size worked with 9.5% FPR.
Recommended Citation
Sun, Fei, "Security Evaluation of a Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) Application" (2020). All Theses. 3429.
https://open.clemson.edu/all_theses/3429