Survey of Authentication and Privacy Schemes in Vehicular ad hoc Networks

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have become increasingly common in recent years due to their critical role in the field of smart transportation by supporting Vehicle-to-Vehicle and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure communication. The security and privacy of VANET are of the utmost importance due to the use of an open wireless communication medium where messages are exchanged in plain text, something which allows attackers to intercept, tamper, replay, and delete them. Hence, there is a high probability that the safety of a VANET-based smart transportation system could be compromised. Nowadays, securing and safeguarding the exchange of messages in VANETs is the focus of many security research teams, as reflected by the number of authentication and privacy schemes that have been proposed. However, these schemes have not fulfilled all aspects of the security and privacy requirements. The present paper is an effort to provide a thorough background on VANETs and their components; various types of attacks on them; and all the security and privacy requirements for authentication and privacy schemes for VANETs. This paper is among the first to provide a comprehensive survey of the existing authentication and privacy schemes and compare them based on all security and privacy requirements, computational and communicational overheads, and the level of resistance to different types of attacks. It also provides a qualitative comparison with the existing surveys. This paper could serve as a guide and reference in the design and development of any new security and privacy techniques for VANETs.