2012 Volume 20 Issue 4 Pages 846-853
In Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs), the vehicular scenario requires smart signaling, smart road maintenance and other services. A brand new security issue is that the semi-trusted Road Side Units (RSUs) may be compromised. In this paper, we propose an Elliptic curve ElGamal Threshold system-based key management scheme for safeguarding a VANET from RSUs being compromised and their collusion with malicious vehicles. We analyze the packet loss tolerance for security performance demonstration, followed by a discussion on the threshold. After discussion of the feasibility on privacy and processing time, overhead analysis is presented in terms of two types of application scenarios: Emergency Braking Notification (EBN) and Decentralized Floating Car Data (DFCD). Our method can promote security with low overhead in EBN and does not increase overhead in DFCD during security promotion.