Securing Southbound Interface of HSDN-GRA Vehicular Routing Protocol using a Distributed Trust

The progress of wireless technologies in recent years has tipped the automotive industry towards the digital world with multiple communication systems forming Internet of Vehicles (IoV). These communication systems are subject to disturbances and alterations due to the wireless and dynamic characteristics of vehicles. IoV aims to integrate new information services, safety applications, and internet services, based on the benefits of cloud computing, It tries to improve safety and comfort on the road. The deployment of these services requires messages to be exchanged between the vehicles in a secure manner. Consequently, routing and security topics are crucial to provide a quality of services and to preserve the data integrity. The Software Defined Networking (SDN) architecture is the way that can guarantee these two issues. The purpose of this paper is, firstly, to present the impact of SDN architecture in a vehicular network. Besides, as the robustness of the routing protocols depends on the integrity and authenticity of the routing rules, an improvement of the HSDN-GRA vehicular routing protocol is also described. This improvement develops a distributed trust model and aims to secure the communication between the control plane and the data plane. The goal is to secure the southbound interface between the defined semi-centralized controller and the other vehicles, as well as the Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) communication.