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Prevention of Timing Attack in Software Defined
Named Data Network with VANETs
Ahmad Arsalan
Department of Computer Science
National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences
Chiniot-Faisalabad Campus, 35400, Pakistan
Email: ahmadarslan31@gmail.com
Rana Asif Rehman
Department of Computer Science
National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences
Chiniot-Faisalabad Campus, 35400, Pakistan
Email: r.asif@nu.edu.pk
Abstract—Software Defined Network (SDN) is getting popu-
larity both from academic and industry. Lot of researches have
been made to combine SDN with future Internet paradigms to
manage and control networks efficiently. SDN provides better
management and control in a network through decoupling of
data and control plane. Named Data Networking (NDN) is a
future Internet technique with aim to replace IPv4 addressing
problems. In NDN, communication between different nodes done
on the basis of content names rather than IP addresses. Vehicular
Ad-hoc Network (VANET) is a subtype of MANET which is
also considered as a hot area for future applications. Different
vehicles communicate with each other to form a network known
as VANET. Communication between VANET can be done in two
ways (i) Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) (ii) Vehicle to Infrastructure
(V2I). Combination of SDN and NDN techniques in future
Internet can solve lot of problems which were hard to answer
by considering a single technique. Security in VANET is always
challenging due to unstable topology of VANET. In this paper,
we merge future Internet techniques and propose a new scheme
to answer timing attack problem in VANETs named as Timing
Attack Prevention (TAP) protocol. Proposed scheme is evaluated
through simulations which shows the superiority of proposed
protocol regarding detection and mitigation of attacker vehicles
as compared to normal timing attack scenario in NDN based
VANET.
Index Terms—Content, Interest, Software Defined Networks,
Named Data Networking, Ad Hoc Networks, Vehicular Ad Hoc
Networks, Timing Attack
I. INTRODUCTION
As Internet is flourishing, network communication is be-
coming complex and error prone. Users need better and
efficient ways to communicate with each other. Due to increase
in Internet applications like online games, VoIP, and video
streaming, communication networks need better mechanism to
manage and control the complexity of the system. Complex
network system is composed of large number of switches,
routers or hubs. It is the duty of the network administrator to
compose and implement different protocols on large variety of
networks. The main problem occurs when administrator has
to implement these protocols through low stage commands
which are hard and complex to remember as well as they
have restricted tools to perform such actions on a network.
Therefore, management and control of a network is complex
and error sensitive.
Software Defined Network (SDN) [1] is a new emerging
field in computer networks with aim to manage and control
the network systems more easily and efficiently. SDN main
function is to separate the network devices (i.e. switches,
routers) from the control decisions. Its benefit is that it
strikingly change the management of a network from complex
to simple. There are two basic components of SDN (i) Control
plane (ii) Data plan. Control plane consist of SDN controller
which manages and control whole network while data plane
consists of switches or routers which forward the data to other
nodes. SDN controller can be programmable through simpler
interface.
Named Data Networking (NDN) [2] is a new technique in
computer networks with aim to overcome all the issues of
IPv4 addressing. In NDN, communication between different
nodes can be achieved through content names rather than their
IPv4 addresses. In this process, one or more nodes become
consumer or producer nodes. A consumer node is a node
which needs a specific data and producer node is a node which
contains that specific data and respond back to the consumer
node by sending requested data. This mechanism is used to
overcome the addressing limitation of IPv4 [3].
Another paradigm that is getting popular now a days is
Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs). VANET is basically
a sub type of Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs)[4]. In
VANET, communication is done between vehicles in two
forms . (i) Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) (ii) Vehicle to Infrastruc-
ture (V2I) [5]. In V2V, communication is done between two
or more different vehicles on highway. Packets are exchanged
between vehicles until the receiving vehicle received the
packets. In V2I, communication is done with vehicles and road
side units (RSUs). Road side units are static infrastructures
which can be in form of road side signals. Packets are ex-
changed between vehicles and RSU until the producer vehicle
received these packets. The packets exchanged in VANETs
are categorized into two types (i) Safety critical packets (ii)
Infotainment packets.
With the combinations of all these techniques different
security attacks can mitigate easily. Timing attack is one of
the attack that can be detected and mitigated using SDN
and NDN in VANETs. In timing attack an attacker node
exist in a network which add delay in safety critical packets.
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2018 International Conference on Frontiers of Information Technology (FIT)
978-1-5386-9355-1/18/$31.00 ©2018 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/FIT.2018.00050
These packets can contain information about an accident, vip
protocol or traffic jam scenario.
Therefore, in this paper, by taking the advantages of SDN
and NDN communication paradigm in VANETs, we proposed
a mechanism to overcome the timing attack problem named as
Timing Attack Prevention (TAP) protocol. In TAP, a legitimate
vehicle detects an attacker vehicle while network controller is
used to mitigate that detected attacker.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. In Section
II, we discussed detailed studies in terms of timing attack.
Section III defines the architecture of software defined named
data network with VANET. Then in section IV, we describe
the main research problem which we tackled in our scheme. In
section V, we presented our proposed scheme regarding timing
attack problem. Section VI provides the simulation results and
analysis, and finally the conclusions are presented in Section
VII.
II. RELATED WORK
In this section, we discuss some of the studies which are
done on software defined named data network with VANET
and on timing attack problem.
Ahmad et al [6]. proposed first ever architecture of soft-
ware defined vehicular network with respect of named data
networking. They discussed possible combination of NDN
with sofware defined vehicle network (SDVN). Main working
of their research includes the pull based and push based
forwarding mechanism in SDVN with NDN. This is only paper
till now in which all three SDN, NDN and VANET techniques
are combined together.
Irshad et al [7]. discussed some issues related to timing
attack problem in detail. According to authors, V2V have two
levels of timing attack (i) Basic level attack (ii) Extended level
attack. In basic level, peer to peer (P2P) network communi-
cation suffers from this attack while in extended level, more
than one attacker attacks the network. In V2I, attacker attack
on authentication and for taking services.
Paolo et al [8]. proposed a scheme named VIPER: a
Vehicle-to-Infrastructure Communication Privacy Enforcement
Protocol. This protocol shows strong resilient to three VANET
attacks: timing attack, message volume and message coding
attack. Their results show that VIPER performed well in terms
of message delivery time, message path length and queue
occupancy.
In addition to these schemes, there exist multiple research
studies on timing attack in VANET. However, all above
mentioned schemes are limited to one or two future Internet
paradigm and there exist no such scenario in which SDN,
NDN and VANET technologies are implemented together.
In this paper, we are first to our knowledge that combined
SDN, NDN and VANET paradigm together and implemented
a novel scheme for timing attack which not only detect but
also mitigate attacker from network with the help of SDN.
III. SOFTWARE DEFINED NAMED DATA NETWORK WITH
VANET
In software defined named data network with VANET
architecture, a centralized controller is present which is used
to manage and control whole network. Communication be-
tween different vehicles and controller is done through NDN
messages. Vehicles which are interested in communication
are called consumer vehicles. These vehicles broadcast the
NDN request packets which are known as interest packets. In
reply of consumer nodes, there exist multiple producer nodes
which contain requested data in their cache. Data packets are
generated same like interest packets from producers which
are than sent back to consumers. In software defined named
data network with VANET, each vehicle communicate with
other vehicles and road side units (RSUs). These RSUs than
broadcast corresponding packets to other RSUs and controller
through Internet. Response of these corresponding packets
follow exact same path from controller to vehicles. Also
each vehicle in network have its own cache to store data
[6]. As shown in Fig 1., red consumer vehicle generates
interest packets which are broadcast in vehicle range. Two
other vehicles and RSU2 receive these packets. On arrival of
these packets each vehicle forward data packet to consumer
vehicle if they have data in their cache. In case of RSU2,
it forwards the packet to controller using Internet and than a
response from controller is forwarded to corresponding vehicle
by RSU2 using same path.
A. Traditional NDN implementation
In native NDN, when a new packet arrived it only takes one
of two possible processing paths which is determined using
packet type. This packet type is decoded to check whether
incoming packet is interest or data packet. There exist three
data structures in NDN named as pending interest table (PIT),
content store (CS) and forwarding information base (FIB)
[3]. If decoded packet turns out to be a data packet than
first of all PIT entry of corresponding node is checked. If
PIT entry matched than node caches the data in its CS and
forward data to next nodes. If PIT entry does not matches
than it simply discard the packet. In case of interest packet,
PIT entry of corresponding node is matched against interest
packet. If PIT is found than its mean that this specific interest
is already present in node so it simply discard the packet. If
PIT is not found, it first check its CS and if no entry found
in CS it forwards the packet to FIB which is responsible of
forwarding it to next face. However, if CS entry found than
node simply forwards the data in response of interest packet.
Fig 2. shows packets processing in traditional NDN. Further
studies regarding NDN implementation over VANET can be
found in [9],[10],[11].
IV. TIMING ATTACK PROBLEM
As the Internet is expanding the network security is be-
coming more complex. Lot of researches have been done
both on traditional wired and wireless networks in terms
of security of networks. Through these researches lot of
248
Fig. 1. Software defined named data network with VANET architecture
Fig. 2. Packet processing in NDN
attacks are mitigated but some of them are still pending in
wireless due to its unstable topologies. In VANETs, there are
two type of applications (i) Safety critical applications (ii)
Infotainment applications [4]. Safety critical applications are
those application which require data in real time. They contain
sensitive data which must be received to vehicles without any
delay. These applications contain data about the situation of
highway like accident information, VIP protocol movement
and traffic jam. Transmitting and receiving data in VANET
are important to achieve data integrity and security. Timing
attack which is relatively a new attack in VANETs contains
one or more attacker vehicles. These attacker vehicles do not
forward the safety critical data to other vehicles on right time
but they add some extra delays in packets in terms of time-slots
[7]. However, other vehicles which are near to attacker vehicle
received these data packets after they actually require it. Fig 3
graphically illustrates timing attack scenario. In this scenario,
an accident is occurred between vehicle A and B. Vehicle
B broadcast this critical information in terms of emergency
packet in a network. Therefore, when this emergency packet
is received on malicious yellow vehicle it does not transmit
it to the vehicle C at the right time. But it add some extra
delay in terms of time-slots in the packet so whenever vehicle
C receives these emergency packet it is on the spot C1where
the accident has occurred [12],[13].
V. P ROPOSED SCHEME
In this section, we proposed a scheme for timing attack
problem named as Timing Attack Prevention (TAP) protocol to
detect and mitigate attacker vehicle in software defined named
data network with VANET.
A. Timing Attack Prevention (TAP)
Detection of the attacker vehicles and than mitigating them
using the functionality of controller in a network is the respon-
sibility of TAP scheme. Algorithm 1 shows the processing of
249
Fig. 3. Timing attack scenario
send and receive emergency packet for safety critical applica-
tions. In order to send emergency packets to other vehicles,
first coordinates and vehicle ID of corresponding vehicle are
set in the packet fields i.e x coordinates,y coordinates and vID
fields respectively (Lines 1-5). After that vehicle gets packet
arrival time (PAT) and previous packet arrival time (PPAT). But
if corresponding vehicle is consumer and sending the packet
for very first time in the network than PAT,PPAT values will be
0 (Lines 6-7). Now in the last packet generation time (PGT) is
get using clock of the vehicle (Line 8). The main contribution
of the proposed scheme (TAP) is to mitigate the attacker
from the network. However, when a new vehicle received
emergency packet it first checks the Controller-Defaulter-List.
This list will be populated using control messages. Packet
received by a vehicle contains the previous sender vehicle
id. Now this vehicle id is matched against the Controller-
Defaulter-List which was already stored in cache (Line 10). If
results matched than automatically vehicle dropped the latest
packet and perform no further action (Lines 19-20). It shows
that this previously received packet is from such a vehicle
which was already detected as a attacker by controller. If no
results are matched then this means that previously received
packet is from such a vehicle which is not attacker or not
detected as a attacker. So in this case after matching with
attacker list, the detection process start. In detection process,
a vehicle first calculates distance using its x,y and sender’s x,y
coordinates (Line 11). In next step, after distance calculation
vehicle finds out the time period in which a packet is arrived
from a source to destination using signal propagation speed
which is equal to 3.0*108m/s. is a time period which can
be get by dividing distance (D) over signal speed (S) (Line
12). After that this time period value is minus from packet
arrival time (PAT) to get previous vehicle arrival time to check
whether previous vehicle added any delay in packet or not
(Line 13-14). If the value of previous vehicle arrival time
does not matches with the value of (PPAT) in packet then
it means that previous vehicle is attacker and added delay in
the packet. This packet is now useless as it comes to vehicles
after they actually require it. Therefore, previous vehicle id is
then forwarded to controller so that it stores attacker id in its
defaulter list (Line 15) and if no delay is added then vehicle
simply forward the emergency packet to other vehicles as this
means that previous vehicle is not an attacker vehicle (Lines
16,17).
VI. PERFORMANCE EVALUATIONS
We use ndnSim [14] using NS3 and SUMO [15] to simulate
proposed scheme and considered protocol in vehicular ad-hoc
network scenario. We randomly generate mobility of 64 vehi-
cles in a network. These vehicles move in a constant speed.
Therefore no vehicle can overtake others. Some simulation
parameters regarding TAP is shown in Table 1.
In our scenario, we assume that 70% of vehicles are
legitimate users while remaining 30% are attacker vehicles.
To investigate average delay and duplicate emergency packets
we vary the number of attackers in a network. Attackers
proportion are set as 5%,10%,15%,20%,25%. We simulate
our simulations for 300s. We also use IEEE 802.11a, since
IEEE 802.11p is not supported by ndnSIM v2.0 [16].In our
simulations, we evaluated percentage of attackers that gener-
ated delays, control broadcast ratio and duplicate emergency
packets. To evaluate the performance of both proposed and
normal VNDN with attacker we have considered following
metrics:
Average delay: Average delay can be measured by adding
all delays. A delay can be define as amount of time taken by
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TABLE I
SIMULATION PARAMETERS
Parameter Value
Number of vehicles 64
Type of vehicles Mobile
Area (m * m) 1000 * 1000
Mobility Uniform
Simulation time 300s
No. of attackers 5%,10%,15%,20%,25%
Emergency packet timout 20s
No. of legitimate vehicles 70%
Mobility model used Random Direction
MAC Layer IEEE 802.11a
Packet size 400 bit
Tx power 0.0091 mW
Traffic Generator Tool SUMO
packet to travel across network from source to destination.
Control packets broadcast ratio: This ratio is equal to total
number of control packets generated by controller whenever
an attacker vehicle is identified.
Duplicate Emergency packets (DEP): Duplicate emergency
packets are those packets which attacker vehicles generate
after adding time slots.
Fig. 4. Average delay of attacker vehicles
A. Simulation Results
Fig 4. represents average delay according to the attacker
vehicles in a normal VNDN. As simulation time increases in
normal VNDN with attacker implementation, attacker vehicles
generate more delay. This is mainly due to the fact that there
exist no such mechanism to prevent attackers from adding
time-slots in packets.
Fig 5. shows the ratio of control packets. These packets are
exchanged in a network when an attacker is identified by a
legitimate vehicle. Control packets broadcast ratio is directly
proportional to number of attackers. These control packets
include attacker vehicle ids that were identified in detection
phase. TAP mitigation phase done on each vehicles whenever
a new packet is received.
Fig. 5. Control packets broadcast ratio according to attackers
Fig. 6. Duplicate emergency packets with respect to time
Fig 6. shows number of duplicate emergency packets. These
packets are generated whenever attacker vehicles add delays
in packets. In normal VNDN with attackers, large number
of duplicate emergency packets were broadcast in network.
While in case of TAP, this number decreased significantly
due to controller defaulter list. This list is checked by every
vehicle before starting detection phase. These vehicles match
the coming packet vehicle id field to controller defaulter
list and performs action according to the function of receive
emergency packet in algorithm 1.
VII. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we implemented software defined named data
networking with VANET and proposed technique to tackle
timing attack in safety critical applications. In TAP, we first
detect a vehicle to check whether corresponding vehicle is
an attacker or not. When an attacker vehicle is detected,
251
SDN controller is used to mitigate it with the help of con-
troller defaulter list. This mechanism ensured that no delayed
emergency packets forwarded in the network. This detection
process is always done on next hop node from attacker vehicle.
Our simulation results show that increased delay is due to
increased attacker vehicles in a network and also control
packets broadcast ratio increases with increase of attacker
vehicles. Duplicate emergency messages are also decreased
in a network with the help of TAP protocol while in case of
normal VNDN timing attack they increases significantly.
As a future work, we will work on other security issues of
VANET with support of NDN and SDN controller.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
I would like to thanks my supervisor Dr. Rana Asif Rehman
for the motivation and support. This research work was funded
by National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences.
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