Improved Mutual Authentication in VANETs

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are a key of the intelligent transport system. In fact, these networks provide many interesting services such as exchanging live messages like road conditions, targeted location based advertisements, traffic congestion and weather conditions to enhance the driving comfort. However, these benefits have become threatening or even dangerous if they are not well secured in both communications V2V (vehicle to vehicle) and V2I (Vehicles to infrastructure). Moreover, as the security must be strong, it must not degrade the Quality of Service (QoS), especially with the raised speed of vehicles in VANETs, the addition of extra messages for security, which can be very critical in terms of QoS. Existing works on this topic presents some solutions to secure VANET communications. We mention the Dual Authentication and Key Management Techniques for Secure Data Transmission in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks. This solution is characterized by a good quality of service compared to other solutions, but it lacks a lot of security properties. In this work, we present an enhancement to this solution to obtain a strong security and maintain the good QoS at the same time. We establish a new authentication process and add a re-authentication process to ensure both better security properties and optimal authentication delay by optimizing the amount of information and the computational delay. Security analysis proves that our scheme is secure and the result of performance validation is promising.