b-SPECS+: Batch Verification for Secure Pseudonymous Authentication in VANET

Abstract

The security and privacy preservation issues are prerequisites for vehicular ad hoc networks. Recently, secure and privacy enhancing communication schemes (SPECS) was proposed and focused on intervehicle communications. SPECS provided a software-based solution to satisfy the privacy requirement and gave lower message overhead and higher successful rate than previous solutions in the message verification phase. SPECS also presented the first group communication protocol to allow vehicles to authenticate and securely communicate with others in a group of known vehicles. Unfortunately, we find out that SPECS is vulnerable to impersonation attack. SPECS has a flow such that a malicious vehicle can force arbitrary vehicles to broadcast fake messages to other vehicles or even a malicious vehicle in the group can counterfeit another group member to send fake messages securely among themselves. In this paper, we provide a secure scheme that can achieve the security and privacy requirements, and overcome the weaknesses of SPECS. Moreover, we show the efficiency merits of our scheme through performance evaluations in terms of verification delay and transmission overhead.