Modern Applied Science; Vol. 11, No. 5; 2017 ISSN 1913-1844 E-ISSN 1913-1852 Published by Canadian Center of Science and Education 30 Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks and Security Issues: Survey Zaid A. Abdulkader 1,2 , Azizol Abdullah 2 , Mohd Taufik Abdullah 2 & Zuriati Ahmad Zukarnain 2 1 Al Iraqia University, Baghdad, Iraq 2 Faculty of Computer Sciences and Information Technology Universiti Putra Malaysia 43400 Serdang, Malaysia Correspondence: Azizol Abdullah, Faculty of Computer Sciences and Information Technology Universiti Putra Malaysia 43400 Serdang, Selangor, Malaysia. E-mail: azizol@upm.edu.my Received: January 28, 2017 Accepted: February 25, 2017 Online Published: April 8, 2017 doi:10.5539/mas.v11n5p30 URL: https://doi.org/10.5539/mas.v11n5p30 Abstract Vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) technologies are evolving networked communications advances that incorporate mobile-based routing protocol sets for inter-vehicular exchanges of information in support of smart transportation networks. Privacy and security difficulties are primary concerns in VANET research as a result of the repeated vehicular movements, time-critical responses, and hybrid VANET architectures that differentiate these from other ad hoc networking types. Therefore, the design of secure mechanisms for authenticating and validating message transmissions between vehicles and eliminating adversarial elements from networks are of considerable importance in VANET research. This report offers a review of VANET features and security difficulties. The paper also summarizes certain chief threats to the authentication, confidentiality, and availability of secure services. Keywords: vehicular ad hoc networks, security, privacy, road side unit, on-board unit, wormhole attack, sybil attack, blackhole attack 1. Introduction Most people these days use vehicular transports to transit between various places. The increase in vehicular traffic on street networks has also led to rising road queues and fatalities. These can be lessened by affording proper knowledge about street conditions and the neighboring environment to the driving public via secure means. Increases in severe driving problems has led to more street accidents and increased traffic congestion. To resolve these types of problems, vehicles can be equipped with networked communications for exchanging data between vehicles and among vehicles as well as road side units (RSUs). So as to share linked data on important road situations, VANETs provision dual categories of communication exchanges, e.g. vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications and vehicle-to-RSU (V2R) communications (Blum & Eskandarian, 2004). With vehicle-to-vehicle communications, cars directly exchange communications with other cars in order to share situational data. With vehicle-to-RSU communications, cars directly exchange communications with RSUs that are installed alongside the roads. Dedicated short-range communications (DSRC) radio (Jiang and Delgrossi, 2008) is utilized for V2V and V2R communication exchanges in VANETs. The information shared in VANETs is categorized into dual categories, namely safety data and non-safety data. In these dual categories of information, safety data such as curve speed and pedestrian crossing alerts comprise the primary knowledge that is shared to inform drivers about upcoming dangers, so as to reduce the chances of encountering traffic accidents and queues. The objective of provisioning safety data is to protect lives, health, and property (Robinson et al., 2007). Non-safety data is used to improve driving comfort and afford riders value-added service offerings, including pointers to the nearest hospitals and petrol station (Plossl et al., 2006) (Jakubiak & Koucheryavy, 2008). Safety data is not, however, prioritized over non-safety data. Although VANETs offer numerous facilities, malicious users can target VANET wireless media and expose these to different kinds of exploits, including eavesdropping, interference, jamming, etc. (Dhamgaye & Chavhan, 2013). Although numerous exploits exist for compromising the VANET communications security, several researchers have evolved dissimilar strategies (Hao et al., 2011) (Zhang & Lu, 2008) in securing VANET communications. VANET designs must essentially deliver on security for services in terms of information integrity, confidentiality, availability, authentication, and non-repudiation in order to safeguard VANET networks from attack (Raya & Hubaux, 2007). The safeguarding of privacy is an additional major difficulty. To preserve the privacy of users’ information, their actual identities (ID) and locational data needs to be protected from undesirable intrusion. User information can be however be transmitted