A Lightweight Secure VANET-based Navigation System

Recently, large scale vehicle ad hoc networks (VANETs)-based navigation systems have drawn much research attention. Although an enhanced secure and privacy VANET-based navigation (EVSPN) scheme has been proposed to prevent the replay and man-in-the-middle attacks, providing signature and verification on the public key infrastructure (PKI) based signatures of all messages relayed costs much computation resource and incurs a high authentication delay for not only the vehicles but also the roadside units (RSUs), especially when the navigation service is busy. In this paper, we propose a lightweight secure VANET-based navigation scheme (LSVN) that has a lower computation cost and a lower authentication delay. By the LSVN, a vehicle firstly initiates the navigation service with a RSU nearby to request a shared symmetric key for further communication with other RSUs in the VANET. Then, the best route will be calculated. The pseudo identity of the vehicle and the shared keying materials are sent to the RSUs on the route of the vehicle to its destination. At last, the vehicle will be led to the destination by these RSUs in series. We formally verify, by BAN Logic, that the LSVN scheme can provide the guarantee of the integrity of messages and mutual authentication. Performance analysis shows that the LSVN can minimize the use of cryptographic operations and reduce authentication delay significantly comparing with the VSPN scheme and the EVSPN scheme.