A Certificate Enhanced Group Key Framework for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) have emerged new prospects in a wide range of researches. Information exchange in VANETs relies on the transmission of packets between vehicles and road-side units. The messages are easily stolen by the malicious users due to the nature of wireless broadcast, and therefore, VANETs need security mechanisms to protect data privacy. Vehicles can be organized into different groups, and members of a vehicular group share a group key to encrypt their messages; even so, they are still exposed to malicious attacks. In this paper, we propose a group key framework with certificate authority in VANETs, where each group has a group leader responsible for the management of members and keys to enhance certificate operations secures the group communication. According to our security analysis and efficiency evaluation, the proposed mechanisms have lightweight overheads in terms of computational and communication requirements, as also to provide better secure vehicular communication than other similar researches in this field.