Security in Vehicle-to-Infrastructure Communications

By 2020, the number of connected vehicles will reach 250 million units. Thus, one of five vehicles worldwide will count on any wireless connection. Functional areas such as telecommunications, infotainment, automatic driving, or mobility services will have to face the implications caused by that growth. As long as vehicles require exchanging information with other vehicles or accessing external networks through a communication infrastructure, these vehicles must be part of a network. A VANET is a type of mobile network formed by base stations known as Road Side Units (RSU) and vehicles equipped with communication units known as Onboard Units (OBU). The two modes of communication in a VANET are Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I). Some authors consider that V2I communication has more advantages than V2V communication because V2I communication provides services such as driving guidance or early warning for drivers. This consideration has meant that researchers show more interest in this mode of communication. Likewise, others affirm that the problem of V2I communication is its security. This review focuses on knowing the most relevant and current approaches on security in V2I communication. Among the solutions, we have authentication schemes based on Blockchain technology, Elliptic Curve cryptography, key insulation strategy, and certificateless aggregate signature technique. Also, we found security arquitectures and identification schemes based on SDN, NFV, and Fog / Edge / Cloud computing. The proposals focus on resolving issues such as the privacy-preserving, high computational work, regular updating and exposure of secret keys, large number of revoked pseudonyms lists, lack of scalability in networks, and high dependence on certification authorities. In addition, these proposals provide countermeasures or strategies against replay, message forgery, impersonation, eavesdropping, DDoS, fake information, modification, Sybil, man-in-the-middle, and spoofing attacks. Finally, we determined that the attacks in V2I communications mostly compromise security requirements such as confidentiality, integrity, authentication, and availability. Preserving privacy by reducing computational costs by integrating emerging technologies is the direction toward security in vehicular network points.