Preserving security and privacy in large-scale VANETs

Upcoming vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) allowing vehicles to talk to each other are expected to enhance safety and efficiency in transportation systems. This type of networks is especially attractive in highly populated urban areas overwhelmed with traffic congestions and accidents. Besides vulnerabilities versus attacks against traffic safety and driver privacy, a large-scale VANET in a metropolitan area raises scalability and management challenges. This paper employs identity-based group signatures (IBGS) to divide a large-scale VANET into easy-to-manage groups and establish liability in vehicular communications while preserving privacy. Each party's human-recognizable identity is used as its public key and no additional certificate is required. This efficiently avoids the complicated certificate management of existing protocols. We further investigate selfish verification approach to accelerate message processing in VANETs. With this approach, a vehicle selects only the messages affecting its driving decisions and validates the selected messages as if they were a single one.