title: Enabling SDN in VANETs: What is the Impact on Security?
abstract: The demand for safe and secure journeys over roads and highways has been growing at a tremendous pace over recent decades. At the same time, the smart city paradigm has emerged to improve citizens' quality of life by developing thesmart mobilityconcept. Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANETs) are widely recognized to be instrumental in realizing such concept, by enabling appealing safety and infotainment services. Such networks come with their own set of challenges, which range from managing high node mobility to securing data and user privacy. The Software Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm has been identified as a suitable solution for dealing with the dynamic network environment, the increased number of connected devices, and the heterogeneity of applications. While some preliminary investigations have been already conducted to check the applicability of the SDN paradigm to VANETs, and its presumed benefits for managing resources and mobility, it is still unclear what impact SDN will have on security and privacy. Security is a relevant issue in VANETs, because of the impact that threats can have on drivers' behavior and quality of life. This paper opens a discussion on the security threats that future SDN-enabled VANETs will have to face, and investigates how SDN could be beneficial in building new countermeasures. The analysis is conducted in real use cases (smart parking, smart grid of electric vehicles, platooning, and emergency services), which are expected to be among the vehicular applications that will most benefit from introducing an SDN architecture.
authors.affiliation: Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT), University of Luxembourg, 2721 Luxembourg, Luxembourg. antonio.dimaio@uni.lu.
authors.forename: Antonio
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Di Maio
authors.affiliation: Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technologies (LIST), 4362 Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg. mariarita.palattella@list.lu.
authors.forename: Maria Rita
authors.initials: MR
authors.lastname: Palattella
authors.affiliation: Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT), University of Luxembourg, 2721 Luxembourg, Luxembourg. ridha.soua@uni.lu.
authors.forename: Ridha
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Soua
authors.affiliation: Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT), University of Luxembourg, 2721 Luxembourg, Luxembourg. luca.lamorte@uni.lu.
authors.forename: Luca
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Lamorte
authors.affiliation: Computer Science, Multimedia and Telecommunications Department, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, 08018 Barcelona, Spain. xvilajosana@uoc.edu.
authors.forename: Xavier
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Vilajosana
authors.affiliation: Centre Tecnològic de Telecomunicacions de Catalunya (CTTC), 08860 Castelldefels, Barcelona, Spain. jalonso@cttc.es.
authors.forename: Jesus
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Alonso-Zarate
authors.affiliation: Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT), University of Luxembourg, 2721 Luxembourg, Luxembourg. thomas.engel@uni.lu.
authors.forename: Thomas
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Engel
keywords: Software Defined Networking; VANETs; mobility; privacy; security; smart cities