REACT: Secure and efficient data acquisition in VANETs

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) enable vehicles that are not necessarily within the same radio transmission range to communicate with each other and with roadside units (RSUs). The success of data acquisition and delivery systems in VANETs depends on their ability to defend against the different types of security and privacy attacks. The security of safety messages (like emergency and traffic information) has been the concern of VANET security researchers, and very few works dealt with the security of data messages exchanged between users and the infrastructure. This paper introduces a system that takes advantage of the RSUs that are connected to the internet and provide various types of information to VANET users. We provide a suite of novel security and privacy mechanisms in our proposed system, and evaluate its performance using the ns2 software. We demonstrate through comparing its results to those of another system its feasibility and efficiency.