Simple and flexible authentication framework for vehicular Ad hoc NETworks

Vehicular Adhoc NETwork (VANET) provides a variety of applications for road safety, traffic efficiency and driver assistance. VANET enables two types of communication. The communication among vehicles is called as Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication and the communication between the vehicle and the infrastructure is called as Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) communication. This can help to build safer and smart roads by providing timely information to the vehicles. In such scenarios there is a possibility of wide variety of attacks and hence there is a need for a security framework that will protect the network from different types of security attacks. The major security issues in VANET include jamming, forgery, in-transit traffic tampering, impersonation, privacy violation, on-board tampering. To address some of these issues a proper authentication scheme is required. The objective is to reduce the computational burden in authentication between vehicles in a heavy traffic scenario. In the proposed system, the Road Side Units (RSU) takes the responsibility to check for message integrity and authenticate the users which reduce the burden of individual vehicles from authenticating each other. The performance is evaluated in terms of average end-to-end delay, packet delivery ratio. The results show that the performance of the proposed system is better when compared to the performance of the traditional way of allowing the individual vehicles to authenticate each other.