Light weight security protocol for communications in vehicular networks

Increasing demand in user-friendly, computationally efficient and sophisticated vehicles led automobile industries to manufacture them with efficient onboard sensors, communication devices, resource rich hardware. Vehicular resources provide infotainment on-the-go. In mere future, every vehicle is a resource full machine. The vehicular resources which include computing power, storage and internet connectivity can be shared among the vehicles or can be lend over the internet to various customers. Vehicles can comprehensively make use of the resources available with road-side units (RSU’s) to communicate with other vehicles and RSU’s. Vehicular communications are useful especially in situations of accidents (or) natural calamities. Vehicles can update the RSU’s with information regarding such events. This information can then be broadcasted to the vehicles in that area or path. The proposed scheme ensures secure and efficient communications among nodes in a hierarchy consisting of vehicles, RSU’s, RSU co-ordinators and Trusted authority. The approach outlined in the paper can be used to decrease the overhead involved in secure transfer of information during communication.