Establishing Trust on VANET Safety Messages

We introduce a new scheme for safety message authentication in VANETs. For a practical implementation of VANET, we anticipate that road side units (RSUs) are not physically protected and are prone to several different attacks including node compromise attacks. Thus, an RSU should not be automatically trusted by on road vehicles. In our proposed scheme, a road side controller (RSC) is responsible for controlling all the RSUs, and delivering messages through RSUs to vehicles in a given area, where each RSU uses a proxy signature mechanism based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), which is a variation of known ECDS-based proxy signature schemes and modified according to the VANET’s criteria and security requirements. The underlying network constraints and properties from VANET standards have been taken into consideration along with the security, reliability and other related issues. We also discuss the potential forgery and attack scenarios on our proposed scheme. The security analysis and simulation results prove the strength and adaptability of our proposed scheme in