Dual Authentication and Key Management Techniques for Secure Data Transmission in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are an important communication paradigm in modern-day mobile computing for exchanging live messages regarding traffic congestion, weather conditions, road conditions, and targeted location-based advertisements to improve the driving comfort. In such environments, security and intelligent decision making are two important challenges needed to be addressed. In this paper, a trusted authority (TA) is designed to provide a variety of online premium services to customers through VANETs. Therefore, it is important to maintain the confidentiality and authentication of messages exchanged between the TA and the VANET nodes. Hence, we address the security problemby focusing on the scenario where the TA classifies the users into primary, secondary, and unauthorized users. In this paper, first, we present a dual authentication scheme to provide a high level of security in the vehicle side to effectively prevent the unauthorized vehicles entering into the VANET. Second, we propose a dual group key management scheme to efficiently distribute a group key to a group of users and to update such group keys during the users' join and leave operations. The major advantage of the proposed dual key management is that adding/ revoking users in the VANET group can be performed in a computationally efficient manner by updating a small amount of information. The results of the proposed dual authentication and key management scheme are computationally efficient compared with all other existing schemes discussed in literature, and the results are promising.