A Novel Authentication Scheme for V2I Communication Based on WAVE Unicast Services

One of the most challenging issues in vehicular network designs is security matter. Particularly, there have been several potential attacks (e.g., message alteration, eavesdropping, privacy violation, and replay) on Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I) communication. Most previous studies have based on Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and authentication in broadcast services. By relying on the PKI solutions, cryptographic overhead and the management difficulties of public key certificates can be problematic. Furthermore, broadcast services can cause network flooding. Hence, this paper proposes a novel authentication scheme based on WAVE unicast services to reduce the PKI overhead between vehicles and Road Side Units (RSU). The new scheme is based on Pairwise Transient Key (PTK) procedures with a few extra authentication steps. To evaluate the new scheme, we have experimented on a Network Simulator (NS-2) under both city and highway scenarios. The experimental results have demonstrated that our new scheme introduces only small WAVE Short Message (WSM) delay. The new scheme is also flexible to use in various scenarios under different road situations.