Message Authentication in Vehicular Ad hoc Networks: ECDSA Based Approach

Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) are promising approach for facilitating road safety, traffic management, and infotainment dissemination for drivers and passengers. However; it is subject to various malicious abuses and security attacks which hinder it from practical implementation. Effective and robust solutions for addressing security and privacy issues are critical for the wide-spread adoption of VANETs. In this paper; we propose an Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) based message authentication in a VANET The operation sequence of the proposed scheme is as follows: 1) Source vehicle generates private key and public key. 2) Public key is made available to all the vehicles in the VANET. 3) Source vehicle creates a hash of the message using secured hash algorithm. 4) Secured hash is encrypted using private key in the source vehicle and sends it to the destination vehicle. 5) At the destination vehicle, the received encrypted message is decrypted using the public key. The result of the decryption will be the hash of the message. 6) Destination vehicle can then hash the message in the same way as source vehicle did and compare the two hashes. Using this proposed scheme, strong authentication policy is provided for the destination vehicle. Because hashing is relatively unique, any changes in the message would change the message hash.