NERA: A new and efficient RSU based authentication scheme for VANETs

In vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs), the correctness of a message requires authentication of the origin vehicle. In this paper, we introduce a novel authentication scheme for VANETs which suggests a new solution for secure vehicle communications. The proposed scheme is an road side unit (RSU) based scheme in which the master key of the Trusted Authority (TA) is embedded in a tamper-proof device provided at the RSUs. Compared with the schemes that store the master key in the on-board units, our scheme is more practical because of a secure and high speed communication link between TA and RSUs. To the best of our knowledge, this solution has not yet been devised for secure authentication in VANETs and the same objective has been fulfilled in this paper. Moreover, we introduce a formal proof to prove the security of the proposed scheme. Finally, we present a simulation and comparison indicating the performance and efficiency of our scheme.