Security and Privacy Issues for Inter-vehicle Communications in VANETs

Vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is an emerging type of networks to allow vehicles on roads to communicate for driving safety. An vehicle can broadcast messages (e.g. accident information) to other vehicles. These messages may have impact on other vehicles as well as the traffic control system, so all messages must be signed and authenticated. On the other hand, privacy should be enforced while the real identity of the sender should be traceable by authorized party. In this poster, we first discuss the limitations of existing solutions. In particular, we describe an impersonation attack to one of the schemes, highlight the problem of communications overhead, and effectiveness of the message verification procedure. Then, we present the main ideas of our proposed scheme which can be shown to be secure and more effective than existing schemes.