A privacy preserving authentication framework for safety messages in VANET

In Vehicular ad hoc networks, security and privacy are the major concerns. A single point of failure may cause great havoc in the network for safety related applications. In this paper, we analyse the recent trends in authentication and privacy preservation based on the signature size, verification time and anonymity. Our investigation shows that the id based signatures are suitable for VANET based safety applications due to its reduced signature size. And, the usage of pseudo identities with id based signatures provides a better solution for privacy preservation. Based on this we propose a framework for privacy preserving authentication which includes key generation by the trusted authority, distribution of keys to the registered vehicles, driver authentication, pseudo id generation by the vehicles, id based signature generation and priority based verification for prioritized messages and batch verification for non-prioritized messages.