Breaking Geographic Routing Among Connected Vehicles

Geographic routing for connected vehicles enables vehicles and roadside infrastructure to exchange information about traffic conditions and road hazards based on their geographic positions. Its security is thus critical to traffic efficiency and road safety. In this paper, we conduct a security analysis of one standardized geographic routing protocol - GeoNetworking-and unfortunately find that its packet forwarding algorithms are vulnerable to two simple attacks. The first inter-area interception attack disturbs the victim vehicle's routing decision making and intercepts packets transmitted from one area to another. The second intra-area blockage attack intervenes packet forwarding within an area by impersonating a packet forwarder in a contention based flooding process; The attacker injects fake packets to its nearby peers and prevents vehicles within an area from receiving the broadcast packets. We use an open-source simulator to evaluate the effectiveness of proof-of-concept attacks and assess their attack damages under the settings released in public field tests. The first attack achieves an inter-area interception rate up to 99.9% (>35% in all test cases); The second attack reaches an intra-area packet blockage rate between 35% and 39%, which implies that about one-third vehicles within an area fail to receive broadcast packets. These attacks cause unnecessary traffic jams and collisions which could be avoided if GeoNetworking is properly secured. We further propose standard-compatible solutions to mitigating both attacks and conduct a preliminary evaluation to validate their effectiveness.