An Implementation of Secure Authentication Scheme in VANETs

A VANET is a type of infrastructure less network which uses moving vehicles as the nodes of the network, leading to the formation of a network that spans a wide area. The issue of primary concern in VANETs is that the nodes are in continuous motion, making it difficult to identify which of these nodes belong to a particular network and which of these nodes do not. For a VANET to be successful, information should be communicated privately and safely to the concerned node only, and for this, it is important to know which nodes are reliable parts of the particular VANET and which nodes will most definitely forward the information to the desired destination. This is where secure authentication schemes play a major role. Authentication of an entity and the message sent by the entity ensure that the entity is definitely part of the network and the message that has been received is not bogus, respectively. There are many different methods of authentication of an entity and the messages that are forwarded in the network. One such method that has been recently devised is the EMAP which makes use of HMAC for authentication. Currently, SHA1 is being used to generate the hash code in this scheme, which is prone to collision attacks. In our project, we aim to overcome the problem of collision by using SHA2 algorithm which has a higher bit length (256-bits) when compared to SHA1 (160-bits) and hence collision resistance can be achieved. The performance of the framework is evaluated in terms of Average End to End delay and Message Loss Ratio for different number of nodes.