Vehicular networks are used to coordinate actions among vehicles in traffic by the use of wireless transceivers (pairs of transmitters and receivers). Unfortunately, the wireless communication among vehicles is vulnerable to security threats that may lead to very serious safety hazards. In this work, we propose a viable solution for coping with Man-in-the-Middle attacks. Conventionally, Public Key Infrastructure is utilized for a secure communication with the pre-certified public key. However, a secure vehicle-to-vehicle communication requires additional means of verification in order to avoid impersonation attacks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that proposes to certify both the public key and out-of-band sense-able static attributes to enable mutual authentication of the communicating vehicles. Vehicle owners are bound to preprocess (periodically) a certificate for both a public key and a list of fixed unchangeable attributes of the vehicle. Furthermore, the proposed approach is shown to be adaptable with regards to the existing authentication protocols. We illustrate the security verification of the proposed protocol using a detailed proof in Spi calculus.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.