Distributed Cooperative Message Authentication

This chapter presents an efficient cooperative message authentication scheme that does not directly involve a trusted authority (TA). First, the chapter proposes a cooperative authentication scheme that doesn't involve intervehicle interaction, using extensive simulations to derive the optimal strategy for vehicle users under different parameter settings. In order to resist the free-riding attacks that do not use fake authentication efforts, an evidence-token mechanism is added. The chapter evaluates the performance of the proposed scheme in a simulated VANET environment. In order to present insight into the performance of the proposed secure cooperative authentication scheme, the authors conducted a set of custom simulations using a Java simulator. The simulation settings and the simulation results are presented here. By the proposed scheme, vehicle users can cooperatively authenticate a bunch of message-signature pairs without direct involvement of a TA.