SecVLC: secure visible light communication for military vehicular networks

Abstract

Technology coined as the vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is harmonizing with Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) and Intelligent Traffic System (ITF). An application sce- nario of VANET is the military communication where ve- hicles move as a convoy on roadways, requiring secure and reliable communication. However, utilization of radio fre- quency (RF) communication in VANET limits its usage in military applications, due to the scarce frequency band and its vulnerability to security attacks. Visible Light Communi- cation (VLC) has been recently introduced as a more secure alternative, limiting the reception of neighboring nodes with its directional transmission. However, secure vehicular VLC that ensures confidential data transfer among the participat- ing vehicles, is an open problem. In this paper, we propose a secure military light communication protocol (SecVLC) for enabling efficient and secure data sharing. We use the directionality property of VLC to ensure that only target vehicles participate in the communication. Vehicles use full- duplex communication where infra-red (IR) is utilized to share a secret key and VLC is used to receive encrypted data. We experimentally demonstrate the suitability of SecVLC in outdoor scenarios at varying inter-vehicular distances with key metrics of interest, including the security, data packet delivery ratio and delay.