Title: Authentication schemes for VANETs: a survey

Authors: Abhijit Das; Dipanwita Roychoudhury; Debojyoti Bhattacharya; Rajavelu Srinivasan; Rajeev Shorey; Tony Thomas

Addresses: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, West Bengal, India ' Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, West Bengal, India ' General Motors Technical Centre India, India Science Lab, Bangalore, Karnataka, India ' General Motors Technical Centre India, India Science Lab, Bangalore, Karnataka, India ' General Motors Technical Centre India, India Science Lab, Bangalore, Karnataka, India ' General Motors Technical Centre India, India Science Lab, Bangalore, Karnataka, India

Abstract: In this paper, we make a survey of the known schemes for V2V (vehicle to vehicle) and V2I (vehicle to infrastructure) authentication in VANETs (vehicular ad hoc networks). We consider a variety of safety applications in VANETs, identify authentication as one of the security requirements and discuss the security challenges for these applications. Existing authentication schemes based on digital signatures are discussed along with schemes based on hash chains and hash trees. It has also been shown how the level of security of these schemes is increased by the involvement of a trusted Certification Authority. We also focus on issues pertaining to anonymity, unlinkability, traceability and computation and communication overhead. Finally, we summarise the limitations of the existing authentication schemes in real-life applications and conclude that further research is essential in this area.

Keywords: V2V authentication; vehicle-to-vehicle; V2I authentication; vehicle-to-infrastructure; VANETs; vehicular ad hoc networks; vehicle safety; security; digital signature; hash chain; hash tree; public key infrastructure; group communication.

DOI: 10.1504/IJVICS.2013.055759

International Journal of Vehicle Information and Communication Systems, 2013 Vol.3 No.1, pp.1 - 27

Received: 31 Jan 2009
Accepted: 07 Jun 2010
Published online: 30 Sep 2014 *

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