Group-based secure source authentication protocol for VANETs

Recently the security in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) draws attention because of increasing vehicular applications. One of the main challenges of secured communication in VANET is multicast source authentication which essentially guarantees that the received data in communication is genuinely sent from the source and not modified by impersonators. Although much research has been focused on message authentication, there are no general accepted solutions widely used for source authentication in VANET because of its dynamic network topology and complicated membership management. In this paper we proposed a Group-based Source Authentication protocol (GSA) to handle the message authenticity in VANETs. Many VANET applications have natural group property and VANET nodes follow the similar moving pattern. GSA makes use of group attributes as dynamic group key to protect data transmission in intra-group communication, which is dynamic changing with real-time environment and consistently updates among group members. Then GSA deploys the promising TESLA scheme to perform source authentication in inter-group communication. The results from our implementation show that GSA can guarantee multicast source authenticity and significantly enhance the efficiency of authentication for multicast communication in VANETs, and our implementation testbed also shows that GSA scheme can be easily deployed in real VANET environment.