Security challenges in future NDN-enabled VANETs

Originally envisioned to tackle the massive content distribution in today's Internet, the Information-Centric Networking (ICN) has turned out to be a promising paradigm for different network scenarios, including Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs). Data retrieval independent from specific recipients bound to fixed physical locations could be a key enabler for future vehicular networks, fixing old unsolved issues of mobility management in classical IP-based systems. As an evidence, several preliminary investigations have been performed on a widely known ICN instance, i.e., the Named-Data Networking (NDN). Nevertheless, the NDN architecture presents a new set of security vulnerabilities. Interest flooding attacks, cache poisoning attacks and privacy violation attacks by means of content names represent concrete NDN threats. While the benefits offered by NDN to vehicular networks have been partially investigated, the impact of major security threats stays unclear. Therefore, this paper opens a more comprehensive discussion of the security risks brought by the application of NDN solutions in VANETs. This is a fundamental first step toward the future design of suitable related countermeasures.