View article

A VANET that uses IEEE 802.11p EDCA mechanism is susceptible to a synchronization-based DDoS attack due to periodicity of transmissions and small contention window sizes. To make things worse, neither the sender nor receivers of periodic broadcasts will be aware of the attack since broadcast communications in VANET do not have acknowledgements. In this paper, we analyze the prospect of a synchronization-based DDoS attacks on vehicular communications and propose mitigation techniques to avoid such an attack.