An efficient secure service discovery protocol for Intelligent Transportation Systems

The number of applications in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) is growing rapidly. Vehicular systems have been widely seen as a promising technique for ITS-based applications. Two main types of applications are considered in vehicular systems: safety and infotainment applications. While the first type of applications provides drivers with warning or alert messages to prevent them from an accident or a disaster, the second type of applications allows drivers and passengers to localize services, get information, and even perform transactions with the surrounding services. Thus, it is very important to have secure discovery and communication with these services, while not affecting drastically the communication delay and the network scalability. In this paper, we discuss the importance of secure service discovery and communication in vehicular systems. Then, we propose a secure service discovery protocol for vehicular systems dedicated mainly to the infotainment type of application. We discuss the security requirements achieved by the proposed protocol and we report on its performance evaluation.