SMSS: Symmetric-Masquerade Security Scheme for VANETs

Security plays an important role in the system design with the development of VANETs. Because of the unreliable communications in VANETs, security protocols need more considerations, such as privacy, authentication, and consistency of messages. However, efficiency has been overlooked before, because previous methods incur significant communication overhead. In this paper, we propose a novel security scheme, named Symmetric-Masquerade Security Scheme (SMSS), which can achieve the security requirements while keeping a low system overhead. In SMSS, we focus on the vehicle-to-vehicle communications, which is among the typical scenarios in VANETs. The symmetric encryption is employed in our scheme to ensure the consistency of the messages, the local pseudonyms are equipped to protect the privacy, and the pre-shared keys are introduced to implement the authentication. This paper makes a detailed description of the novel scheme, then analyzes its performance in comparison with that of the PKI security scheme.