A framework for secure vehicular communication systems

Abstract

Vehicular ad-hoc networks have attracted comprehensive consideration in last few years for their assurance in enhancing driving safety and revolutionizing the transportation systems. Fundamentally, VANET security design should assure the security primitives of authentication, privacy, non-repudiation, integrity, availability, and in some peculiar application scenarios, confidentiality, to defend the network against intruders. Authentication ensures that a message is trustable by correctly identifying the sender of the message. The trust between vehicles is vital to efficiently transmit the data amongst vehicles. The new and attractive paradigm which eliminates the use of certificates in public key cryptography and solves the key escrow problem in identity based cryptography is certificateless cryptography. A new certificateless aggregate signature scheme is proposed for VANETs with constant pairing computations. Assuming the hardness of computational diffie-hellman problem, the scheme is proved to be existentially unforgeable in the random oracle model against adaptive chosen-message attacks. A secure privacy preserving authentication framework is proposed which employs certificateless cryptography for authentication, pseudonyms for anonymous communication and multiple authorities are involved in revealing the identity of the vehicle in case of revocation. The signature verification scheme is improved by the use of bloom filters and the results achieved by the proposed scheme have been implemented on a simulated environment. A fuzzy based trust prediction model is proposed to effectively compute the trust of other vehicles for the secure path formation in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs). The results and analysis of the proposed model over the standard protocols is presented using simulations. A new misbehaviour detection scheme is proposed for the dissemination of correct information.