ESPR: Efficient Security Scheme for Position-Based Routing in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

Vehicular Ad hoc Network (VANET) is a promising emerging technology that enables road safety, traffic management, and passengers and drivers comfort applications. Many applications require multi-hop routing; position-based routing (PBR) is a well-recognized routing paradigm that performs well in the vehicular context to enable these applications. However, there are many security challenges and various routing attacks which may prevent the deployment of PBR protocols. In this study, we propose a novel security scheme called ESPR to secure PBR protocols in VANETs. ESPR considers both digital signature and keyed Hash Message Authentication Code (HMAC) to meet the unique requirements of PBR. In ESPR, all legitimate members share a secret key. ESPR scheme applies a novel probabilistic key distribution to allow unrevoked members to update the shared secret key. Furthermore, it defines a set of plausibility checks that enables network members to detect and avoid PBR attacks autonomously. By conducting security analysis and performance evaluation, ESPR scheme demonstrated to outperform its counterparts in terms of communication overhead and delay while achieving robust and secure operation.