Denial of Service (DoS) Attacks in SDN-Based VANETs: A Study

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) play a vital role in ensuring the success of Intelligent transport systems (ITS), but the architecture of VANETs is vulnerable to several security attacks. There are also some challenges associated with VANETs such as the management of large-scale dynamic heterogeneous networks and secure communication over the network. The research community stressed on the integration of Software-defined Networking (SDN) with traditional VANETs to address these challenges. The SDN enhances the functionality of traditional VANETs by adding a centralised control mechanism, programmability, and flexibility features.The SDN also mitigates some security issues in VANETs to a limited degree. However, SDN's inherent features introduce new security vulnerabilities mainly in the control plane. This paper first examines the characteristics of SDN when integrated with VANETs. Then, this paper discusses the new security vulnerabilitiesthat arise as a result of the integration of SDN into VANET architecture. The mostcritical security attack in SDN-based VANETs is Denial of Service (DoS) attack. This paper also examines different types of DoS attacks in SDN-based VANETs along with their potentialdefence mechanisms. Finally, this paper highlights the future research directions in the domain of securing the network operations of SDN-based VANETs.