Securing Vehicular Networks with VIBES

One of the biggest challenges in making vehicular networks a reality is security. Aside from the clear need for vehicles to be able to authenticate messages from certain personnel, such as police officers and ambulances, secure end-to-end communication will also benefit numerous distributed applications that will be running over these vehicular networks. In this paper, we argue that four design goals must be met for any feasible VANET security system: it must (1) be scalable and allow for correct and efficient authentication, encryption, and key distribution and revocation, (2) be delay tolerant, (3) be DoS resistant, and (4) utilize existing infrastructure in a fashion such that it is readily deployable today, with minimal infrastructure changes. We present and analyze VIBES, a system using Identity-based Encryption and Signatures that meets these design goals and addresses much of the practical issues surrounding the implementation of a vehicular network security system. Furthermore, we show a performance evaluation comparing it to popular certificate-based schemes.