Biblio

The key concerns in VANET communication are the security and privacy of the vehicles involved, but at the same time an efficient way to provide non-repudiation in the ad-hoc network is an important requirement. Most schemes proposed are using public key infrastructure (PKI) or symmetric key encryption to achieve security in VANET; both individually lack in serving the required purpose of providing privacy preservation of the involved On-Board Units (OBUs) (while still being able to offer non-repudiation) and amount to very sizeable overheads in computation. This paper proposes a privacy-preserving authentication protocol that employs hybrid cryptography, using the best features of PKI and symmetric cryptography to form a protocol that is scalable, efficient and offers services of integrity, non-repudiation, conditional privacy, and unlinkability; while still keeping the computational overhead at a reasonable level. The performance and security analysis of this scheme is provided to support the propositions.

Most of the existing authentication protocols are based on either asymmetric cryptography like public-key infrastructure (PKI) or symmetric cryptography. The PKI-based authentication protocols are strongly recommended for solving security issues in VANETs. However, they have following shortcomings: (1) lengthy certificates lead to transmission and computation overheads, and (2) lack of privacy-preservation due to revealing of vehicle identity, communicated in broadcasting safety-message. Symmetric cryptography based protocols are faster because of a single secret key and simplicity; however, it does not ensure non-repudiation. In this paper, we present an Efficient, Scalable and Privacy-preserving Authentication (ESPA) protocol for secure vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). The protocol employs hybrid cryptography. In ESPA, the asymmetric PKI based pre-authentication and the symmetric hash message authentication code (HMAC) based authentication are adopted during vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) and vehicle to vehicle (V2V) communications, respectively. Extensive simulations are conducted to validate proposed ESPA protocol and compared with the existing work based on PKI and HMAC. The performance analysis showed that ESPA is more efficient, scalable and privacy-preserving secured protocol than the existing work.