An Efficient Group Key Agreement Scheme With Antenna Hardware Implementation in VANETs

Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) have become the predominant technology in the current era. Although VANETs have numerous benefits, they are prone to different types of attacks owing to their open nature. Therefore, security plays a crucial role in VANET systems. Ensuring a safe and dependable vehicular communication system is crucial when performing anonymous authentication and group key agreement. Many related works have been proposed based on signature aggregation and group key management; however, they suffer from high computational and communication costs. Hence, in this work, signature aggregation scheme is proposed in such a way that the computational overhead is significantly reduced. Moreover, an ECC-based group management scheme is proposed to secure group communication. In comparison to recent works, the proposed work generates and verifies signatures with an efficiency of 50.03% and 26.26%, respectively. Furthermore, 72.32% and 35.45% efficient in terms of transmission overhead and serving ratio when compared to recent works. To validate this work practically, printed antenna consisting of four elements arranged in a linear array is developed for the intended use. Security analysis is performed in formal and informal ways to prove the security strength of the proposed method. Finally, the performance is validated with similar works using the Cygwin platform with the PBC library.