ABSTRACT
By connecting the vehicles and roadside units (RSUs), vehicular networks (VANETs) enable promising applications for enhancing road safety, mitigating traffic and disseminating safety information among drivers and passengers. The advancement of cognitive radio (CR) technologies, including dynamic spectrum access and adaptive software-defined radios, can improve vehicular communication efficiency by achieving more efficient radio spectrum usage. The prevalent deployment of such vehicular networks, as well as the employment of cognitive radio technologies, raises important concerns about its security and privacy. We must design security mechanisms that ensure integrity, confidentiality, system performances and robustness against frequent and severe malicious attacks.
In this survey paper, we characterize security and privacy issues in vehicular networks with cognitive radio technologies and discuss solutions in achieving secure cognitive communications in vehicular networks. We review how security threats have been raised along with new architectures of vehicular networks. Based on the understanding of potential security threats, we present some current methods that provide security services and preserve privacy. Although these methods can be leveraged to address some security problems, they do not provide a full solution. In fact, many unique challenges exist in new vehicular network architectures with cognitive radio, and remain to be addressed. We conclude the paper with a few promising future research directions towards ensuring security and privacy in vehicular networks.
