SPECS: Secure and privacy enhancing communications schemes for VANETs

Vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is an emerging type of networks which facilitates vehicles on roads to communicate for driving safety. The basic idea is to allow arbitrary vehicles to broadcast ad hoc messages (e.g. traffic accidents) to other vehicles. However, this raises the concern of security and privacy. Messages should be signed and verified before they are trusted while the real identity of vehicles should not be revealed, but traceable by authorized party. Existing solutions either rely heavily on a tamper-proof hardware device, or cannot satisfy the privacy requirement and do not have an effective message verification scheme. In this paper, we provide a software-based solution which makes use of only two shared secrets to satisfy the privacy requirement (with security analysis) and gives lower message overhead and at least 45% higher successful rate than previous solutions in the message verification phase using the bloom filter and the binary search techniques (through simulation study). We also provide the first group communication protocol to allow vehicles to authenticate and securely communicate with others in a group of known vehicles.