A Low-Overhead Message Authentication and Secure Message Dissemination Scheme for VANETs

Given the enormous interest shown by customers as well as industry in autonomous vehicles, the concept of Internet of Vehicles (IoV) has evolved from Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANETs). VANETs are likely to play an important role in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). VANETs based on fixed infrastructures, called Road Side Units (RSUs), have been extensively studied. Efficient, authenticated message dissemination in VANETs is important for the timely delivery of authentic messages to vehicles in appropriate regions in the VANET. Many of the approaches proposed in the literature use RSUs to collect events (such as accidents, weather conditions, etc.) observed by vehicles in its region, authenticate them, and disseminate them to vehicles in appropriate regions. However, as the number of messages received by RSUs increases in the network, the computation and communication overhead for RSUs related to message authentication and dissemination also increases. We address this issue and propose a low-overhead message authentication and dissemination scheme in this paper. We compare the overhead, related to authentication and message dissemination, of our approach with an existing approach and also present an analysis of privacy and security implications of our approach.