Vehicular Ad-hoc Network based Anti-theft Model for car theft prevention in South Africa

Abstract

Vehicle security is an area of major concern as indicated by the rate at which vehicles are stolen in South Africa. This is evident from the statistics found on reputable government sites and from the frequency at which people report stolen or hijacked vehicles. It also seems that despite the various advances in technology accessible to the public, the thefts have not significantly subsided, if at all. The underlying problem is that vehicles on the road have inefficient security technology and the new vehicles being manufactured are using variations of the old technology without removing most of the weaknesses or using new technologies in the vehicles that in turn introduce new ways in which perpetrators can compromise the security of the vehicles. Due to this problem there is a need for a new approach in handling security which not only addresses the problems of the past but ensures that no additional avenues are created through the introduction of new technology. This will in-turn help in the development and introduction of more robust security systems and technologies and further reduce the rate of successful vehicle theft and hijackings. This research attempts to address this security pandemic through the introduction of a new security system based on networking, cryptography and biometrics that aims to safeguard the vehicle through robust security mechanisms and bolster that with sensors to detect hardware tempering. The system uses a One-Time Password implementation to ensure that security keys are not reused and to prevent the capture of compromising information in the event of a data transmission intercept. This is achieved through a simulation approach where the system components are simulated in an effort to examine the effectiveness of the proposed system using a multitude of mobile devices, a wireless network and different computers running Windows and Linux to evaluate the results. An analysis on the results was conducted where the controlled and uncontrolled variations of the simulation were investigated. The results showed the shortfalls in the implementation in the amount of information that the attacker was able to obtain however minimal and showed the strength of the implementation in the robustness of the security and the abstraction of critical data transmitted between the subsystems/ modules of the vehicle security system. It also analysed the ineffectiveness of implementing an open network in such a security system. From the simulations conducted we concluded that the system was effective in the tasks intended and that it severely hampered the ability of a perpetrator compromising it through the analysis of data transmissions and the use of captured data.