TrInc-Based Secure and Privacy-Preserving Protocols for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

In vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), vehicles communicate with each other and with roadside units (RSUs) in order to enhance road safety, improve traffic management and provide infotainment services. Along with the growth of VANETs, some challenges are emerging. Although there are many research work on VANETs, cheating attacks are still not well resolved such as selective message relaying attack, faked information reporting attack and resource-consuming attack launched by selfish or malicious participants. To deal with this kind of attacks, we present two novel lightweight security mechanisms by equipped each vehicle's On-Board Unit (OBU) with a small elegant module called TrInc, which is a trusted hardware and composed of only a non-decreasing counter and a key. We observe that TrInc-based method not only can effectively resist against cheating attacks in safety- oriented, convenience-oriented, and commercial-oriented VANET applications, but also significantly defend various aspects of security and privacy in VANETs. Compared with previous works, our proposal features low communication and computation overhead, less memory requirements, and good network scalability.