Securing Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control in Vehicular Platoons via Cooperative Message Authentication

The requirement of safety, roadway capacity and efficiency in the vehicular network, which makes vehicular platoons concept continue to be of interest. For the authentication in vehicular platoons, efficiency and cooperation are the two most important things. Cooperative authentication is a way to recognize false identities and messages as well as saving resources. However, taking part in cooperative authentication makes the vehicle more vulnerable to privacy leakage which is commonly done by location tracking. Moreover, vehicles consume their resources when cooperating with others during the process of cooperation authentication. These two significant factors cause selfish behaviors of the vehicles not to participate in cooperate cooperation actively. In this paper, an infinitely repeated game for cooperative authentication in vehicular platoons is proposed to help analyze the utility of all nodes and point out the weakness of the current collaborative authentication protocol. To deal with this weakness, we also devised an enhanced cooperative authentication protocol based on mechanisms which makes it easier for vehicles to stay in the cooperate strategy rather than tend to selfish behavior. Meanwhile, our protocol can defense insider attacks.