A Lightweight Authentication and Key Management for Intelligent Transport Systems

"Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) aims to reduce fatalities caused by road accidentsand improve traffic efficiency. Reducing accidents is a critical element that has contributedto drawing research attention to vehicular communication systems (VCS), inwhich vehicles can form a dynamic self-configuring network enabling them to communicatewith other vehicles and road infrastructure. Since road users make their actionsaccording to the information provided in the exchanged safety massages, received messagesshould be reliable. Since the wireless communication channel is vulnerable toattacks, an authentication scheme should be designed to meet the requirements ofsuch networks before any deployment. Due to the large scale of the mobile nodes andhigh volume of exchanged messages in VCS and before designing a security frameworkemploying lightweight cryptographic operations is necessary to maintain low computationand communication overheads. Therefore, lightweight authentication and keymanagement schemes are proposed in this thesis. In this thesis, there are three maincontributions.A Lightweight Authentication Scheme for VCS Based on Timed Efficient Stream Loss-Tolerant Authentication (TESLA) and Bloom Filters (BF) is proposed for vehicle-to-vehicleand vehicle-to-infrastructure communications. The proposed scheme is based onTESLA to achieve lightweight source authentication. Also, Bloom Filter (BF) is utilisedto authenticate TESLA keys instead of digital signatures. Therefore, the proposed workfocuses on reducing the usage of digital signatures to achieve higher success rate andless overheads.The use of digital certificates for authentication in VCS fulfil all the security requirementsbut it can have a high impact on the communication and computation overheads.Thus, a certificateless authentication framework for Vehicular Networks was proposed.This is an enhancement of the first contribution by allowing RSUs authenticate vehicleswithout the need for a digital certificate. However, a digitally signed authentication tokenis used instead of digital signatures, to reduce the communication and computationoverheads while fulfilling the security requirements.An enhanced Certificateless and Lightweight Authentication Scheme for Vehicular CommunicationsSystems is proposed. This work is an extension of the second contribution.Since the performance of TESLA was shown to be suitable for VCS in the first contribution,it is utilised in this contribution as well. Therefore, in this work employs thelightweight authentication token with the lightweight broadcast authentication schemeto achieve the maximum efficiency for VCS. Conventional TESLA does not support instantauthentication, which is undesired for safety-oriented applications. Future movementsof a vehicle is used to enhance the verification of messages, where each vehicleconstructs a table of the future movement prediction before a message is sent. Securityanalysis has been carried out and extensive simulation of our scheme. The results showthat it can withstand a variety of attacks and has a better performance in terms ofverification delay, scalability, and communication overhead than existing schemes, andtherefore, the scheme is well suited for VCS