A security mechanism against the RSU compromise attack in a ticket-based authentication scheme for VANETs

Abstract

In Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANETs), a major necessity is to enable the receiving vehicles to authenticate the received safety related messages while conditionally preserving the privacy of the real identities of the sending vehicles. In order to achieve the aforementioned objectives, we proposed a Ticket-based Authentication Scheme for VANETs Preserving Privacy (TASVPP) [1] and the Optimization of a Ticket-based Authentication Scheme for VANETs (OTASV) [2]. Unfortunately, the problem of the RSU compromise attack has not been considered in both TASVPP and OTASV. Our objective in this paper is then to mitigate this problem by providing two main mechanisms: a RSU compromise prevention mechanism which focuses on resisting side-channel attacks and a RSU compromise detection and reaction mechanism which focuses on detecting, revoking, recovering and isolating compromised RSUs. An in-depth security analysis is also performed to demonstrate that our scheme can meet the targeted security requirements.