Mitigating DoS attacks against signature-based authentication in VANETs

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are supposed to improve traffic safety and drivers' experiences. In a typical VANET, a vehicle broadcasts safety messages to its neighbors. Since behaviors based on safety messages could be life-critical, authentication of these messages must be guaranteed. Many signature-based schemes have been proposed for authentication in VANETs, but few of them have addressed the problem of denial of service (DoS) attacks against signature-based authentication. In such a DoS attack, attackers can broadcast forged messages with invalid signatures to force the receiving vehicles to perform lots of unnecessary signature verifications, and thus the benign vehicles cannot verify the messages from other legitimate vehicles. Our scheme features a pre-authentication process before signature verifying process to deal with this kind of DoS attack. The pre-authentication process takes advantage of the one-way hash chain and a group rekeying scheme. Evaluations show that the proposed scheme mitigates such DoS attacks effectively.