GRAS: A Group Reliant Authentication Scheme for V2V Communication in VANET

Unlike fixed or wired networks, mobile ad-hoc networks pose a number of challenges for peer-to-peer communication due to their dynamic nature. This paper presents a novel framework for vehicleto- vehicle communication controlled and facilitated by a group leader within a group of vehicles. A communication model for a pure ad-hoc network is developed with much concern about the privacy and security of the system, for the ease of effective communication between vehicles with a reduced communication and computational overhead when no fixed infrastructure is present in the roadsides. In the proposed protocol, vehicles within a radio frequency form a group. They elect their leader based on some criteria who is then responsible for generating a group public and private key pair. Each vehicle is equipped with a tamper resistant OBU which is capable of generating public/private keys pairs and also self-certifies the generated keys based on one way hash chaining technique. Any vehicle joins the group communicates the group leader, authenticates itself to obtain the group key. Later, the vehicle uses the group key to send traffic related messages to the group leader who is responsible for batch verifying the authenticity of the message from different sources and one hop broadcast them to reduce the computation overhead on message verification in each vehicle. In addition, our scheme adopts the k-anonymity approach to protect user identity privacy, where an attacker cannot associate a message with the sending vehicle. Extensive analysis and simulations show that the proposed architecture provides an efficient and fully self organized system management for car-to-car communication without the need of any external infrastructure