The design of a secure key management system in vehicular ad hoc networks

VANET is a kind of ad hoc networks which is built among moving vehicles on the road. Due to mobile nodes in VANET topology of network changes dynamically. This impedes trust among nodes and secure data transmission. Authenticity and confidentiality of data and secure end to end communication in network depends on cryptographic keys. In this paper, we designed a secure and reliable key management system; which is responsible to generate, distribute and update the keys in network. Proposed system also allows VANET to authenticate new vehicle before exchanging keys. In proposed system, a Key Management Server (KMS) distributes group key in its group and update when a vehicle joins or leaves the group. The major strength of proposed framework is that group key is updated in linear time, when a vehicle joins or leaves group. Moreover, we analyzed and discussed security strength of framework; which shows that proposed key management system is able to generate and distribute keys securely, resistant to number of attacks and maintain forward as well as backward secrecy in the network.