Provable secure dynamic lightweight group communication in VANETs

The advent of group-oriented communication applications in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) has trigger research on lightweight privacy-preserving Secure Group Communication (SGC) in VANETs. In view of this, many researchers proposed privacy-preserving, authentication, and key agreements schemes. However, these schemes need to address the dynamic nature, heavier processing loads, massive storage, and higher communication. In this direction, we proposed a framework for lightweight dynamic SGC with privacy-preserving and authentication in VANETs, encompassing (i) A lightweight Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC)-based two-party key agreement and its extension to a Dynamic Group Key Agreement, in which fixed Road Side Unit (RSU) acts as Group Controller (GC) with superior computational ability than the On-Board Unit equipped on the vehicles. (ii) An identify-based authentication and privacy-preserving schemes using only two lightweight operations XOR and hashing. (iii) A lightweight encryption and decryption with Exclusive Or (XOR) and hashing only. And (iv) a formal security model for SGC in VANETs. The security analysis shows that the proposed system provides confidentiality of session key, anonymity, secure session key enhancement, and immune to password guessing attack, replay attack, insider attack based on an assumption of the computational G-ECDDH problem. The experimentation is done for authentication, group key agreement, encryption, and decryption times by a varying number of vehicles in the group to 10, 20, 40, 60, 80, and 100 and shown that the proposed technique is taking considerably less computation than other techniques. So the proposed technique is highly desirable in VANETs.