TEAM: Trust-extended authentication mechanism for vehicular ad hoc networks

The security in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) is receiving a significant amount of attention in the field of wireless mobile networking because VANETs are vulnerable to malicious attacks. A number of secure authentication schemes based on asymmetric cryptography have been proposed to prevent such attacks. However, these schemes are not suitable for highly dynamic environments like VANETs, because they cannot cope with the authentication procedure efficiently. Hence, this still calls for an efficient authentication scheme for VANETs. In this paper, we propose a decentralized lightweight authentication scheme called Trust-Extended Authentication Mechanism (TEAM) for vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication networks. TEAM adopts the concept of transitive trust relationships to improve the performance of the authentication procedure. Moreover, TEAM satisfies the following security requirements: anonymity, location privacy, mutual authentication to prevent spoofing attacks, forgery attacks, modification attacks and replay attacks, as well as no clock synchronization problem, no verification table, fast error detection, and session key agreement. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to propose a hash-based authentication scheme with high security properties in VANETs.