On Board unit based authentication for V2V communication in VANET

Abstract

The recent developments in wireless communication technologies along with the plummeting costs of hardware allow both V2V and V2I communications for information exchange. Such a network is called Vehicular ad Hoc Network (VANET) which is very important for various road safety and non-safety related applications. However, Due to the wireless nature of communication in VANETs, it is also prone to various security attacks which are originally present in wireless networks. Hence to realize the highest potential of VANET, the network should be free from attackers, there by all the information exchanged in the network must be reliable i.e. should be originated from authenticated source. However, authentication of vehicles using a PKI based architecture which is mostly based on V2I communication and solely depends on Road side Units, might fail in case of absence of proper infrastructure. Moreover PKI based solutions incur more communication overhead due to repeated connections with the Trusted Authority every time you want to authenticate a vehicle. Hence, this thesis work gives an OBU based authentication mechanism which allows the vehicle to authenticate each other for V2V communication when there is lack of proper infrastructure. Here each vehicle is capable of generating a pair of self-certified public/private key pair which can be verified by any other vehicle using a predefined secret key given by Trusted Authority. The grouping concept used in order to lower the communication overheads. The Vehicle in close proximity of each other form a group. A vehicle can obtain the group key by authenticating itself to the group leader. Our proposed scheme also preserves the privacy of the vehicle but can reveal the identity in liability issues. The security analysis of the proposed scheme shows that it can indeed operate with limited support of infrastructure and can become a fully self-organized system.