Abstract

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have attracted growing interest in both academia and industry because they can provide a viable solution that improves road safety and comfort for travelers on roads. However, wireless communications over open-access environments face many security and privacy issues that may affect deployment of large-scale VANETs. Researchers have proposed different protocols to address security and privacy issues in a VANET, and in this study we cryptanalyze some of the privacy preserving protocols to show that all existing protocols are vulnerable to the Sybil attack. The Sybil attack can be used by malicious actors to create fake identities that impair existing protocols, which allows them to imitate traffic congestion or at worse cause an accident that may result in the loss of human life. This vulnerability exists because those protocols store vehicle identities in an encrypted form, and it is not possible to search over the encrypted identities to find fake vehicles. This attack is serious in nature and very prevalent for privacy-preserving protocols. To cope with this kind of attack, we propose a novel and practical protocol that uses Public key encryption with an equality test (PKEET) to search over the encrypted identities without leaking any information, and eventually eliminate the Sybil attack. The proposed approach improves security and at the same time maintains privacy in VANET. Our performance analysis indicates that the proposed protocol outperforms state-of-the-art protocols: The proposed beacon generation time is constant compared to a linear increase in existing protocols, with beacon verification shown to be faster by 7.908%. Our communicational analysis shows that the proposed protocol with a beacon size of 322 bytes has the least communicational overhead compared to other state-of-the-art protocols.

Highlights

  • Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are a subset of Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) in which smart vehicles act as mobile nodes with their movement governed by road topologies

  • Proof: If Vi tries to get another primary pseudonym by the Sybil attack, Certification authority (CA) will check if Public key encryption with an equality test (PKEET)(VIDi )PKRA exists in its database or not by using the equality test

  • Our cryptanalysis results found that the VANET authentication protocols are vulnerable to Sybil attacks

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Summary

Introduction

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are a subset of Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) in which smart vehicles act as mobile nodes with their movement governed by road topologies. A malicious vehicle can create many fake identities, exploiting this vulnerability which may result in fake congestion in the network and subsequently cause serious accidents To address this problem, we present a novel privacy-preserving protocol secure against the Sybil attack with practical performance. We cryptanalyze existing protocols that protect privacy by encrypting vehicles’ real identities and are claimed to be secure and efficient protocols for VANETs. We show for the first time that they are vulnerable to the Sybil attack because they cannot verify the vehicle identity during primary pseudonym generation, which is encrypted. 2. We propose a novel privacy-preserving protocol secure against the Sybil attack by introducing searchable encryption that allows for verification of encrypted vehicle identities.

Conventional VANET Architecture
Assumptions
Cryptographic Tools
Security and Privacy Requirements
Privacy preservation
Cryptanalysis
Primary Pseudonym Generation
Secondary Pseudonym Generation
Renewal of Primary Pseudonym
Renewal of Secondary Pseudonym
Analysis of Proposed Protocol
Non-repudiation
Vehicle Revocation
Attack Scenarios
Performance Evaluation
Communication Overhead
Findings
Conclusions and Future Work
Full Text
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