Short-lived key management for secure communications in VANETs

Vehicular Ad-hoc NETworks (VANETs) are witnessing an ever increasing interest. Security is a key aspect to pave the road to commercial deployments, as malicious attacks may increase the risk of accidents. Key management in VANETs poses further problems, as connectivity is limited and communication with a central certification authority might be problematic. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to key management for securing VANET communications. In particular, a general framework for key group multicast is proposed, with specific application to a VANET communication scenario.