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.

Share

COinS
 
 

To view the content in your browser, please download Adobe Reader or, alternately,
you may Download the file to your hard drive.

NOTE: The latest versions of Adobe Reader do not support viewing PDF files within Firefox on Mac OS and if you are using a modern (Intel) Mac, there is no official plugin for viewing PDF files within the browser window.