Security vulnerabilities of IEEE 802.11p and visible light communication based platoon

Technology brings autonomous vehicles into the reality where vehicles become capable of cruising themselves. A vehicular platoon contains autonomous vehicles organized into groups with close proximity. It is envisioned that with the increased demand for autonomous vehicles, platoons would be the part of our lives in near future. From this perspective, vehicular platoon control using current dominant IEEE 802.11p (DSRC) is an active research field. However, DSRC suffers from problems of performance degradation due to congestion, the scarcity of radio-frequency (RF) and security. Visible Light Communication (VLC), on the other hand, is a promising complementary technology with the potential to address DSRC problems. In this paper, we investigate the security vulnerabilities of hybrid DSRC-VLC platoon in the presence of outside attackers. We develop a simulation platform to realize the hybrid platoon. We demonstrate that although VLC limits the effect of adversaries, hybrid architectures still suffer from the packet falsification and replay attacks.