RAISE: An efficient RSU-aided message authentication scheme in vehicular communication networks

Addressing security and privacy issues is a prerequisite for a market-ready vehicular communication network. Although recent related studies have already addressed most of these issues, few of them have taken scalability issues into consideration. When the traffic density becomes larger, a vehicle cannot verify all signatures of the messages sent by its neighbors in a timely manner, which results in message loss. Communication overhead as another issue has also not been well addressed in previously reported studies. To deal with these issues, this paper introduces a novel RSU-aided messages authentication scheme, called RAISE. With RAISE, roadside units (RSUs) are: responsible for verifying the authenticity of the messages sent from vehicles and for notifying the results back to vehicles. In addition, our scheme adopts the k-anonymity approach to protect user identity privacy, where an adversary cannot associate a message with a particular vehicle. Extensive simulations are conducted to verify the proposed scheme, which demonstrates that RAISE yields much better performance than any of the previously reported counterparts in terms of message loss ratio and delay.