RSU-based message authentication for vehicular ad-hoc networks

Message authentication that ensures a message is genuine and verifies the source of the sender is a key issue in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). Because messages may provide life-critical traffic information or emergency messages transmitted by unfamiliar sources. Because the vehicle in a VANET transmits messages in real-time in a high-mobility environment, traditional PKI security schemes are not suitable for VANET. The use of roadside units (RSUs) makes message authentication in VANET easy, but it also causes two problems and needed to be solved: how to authenticate messages transmitted between two different RSU ranges, and how to hand off messages for the vehicles moving across different RSU communication ranges. This paper proposes a comprehensive message authentication scheme that enables the message authentication within intra and between inter RSU ranges and hand-off between different RSUs. The proposed scheme balances the overhead for computation and communication with security against attacks. Efficiency analysis and comparison with related works demonstrate that the proposed scheme is a superior message authentication method for VANET.