Enhancing Security on Vehicular Adhoc Networks using EMAP-HMAC

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) adopt the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and Certificate Revocation Lists (CRLs) for their security. In any PKI system, the message authentication is performed by checking if the certificate of the sender is included in the current CRL, and verifying the authenticity of the certificate and signature of the sender. In this paper, we propose an Expedite Message Authentication Protocol (EMAP) for VANETs, which replaces the time-consuming CRL checking process by an efficient revocation checking process. The revocation check process in EMAP uses a keyed Hash Message Authentication Code (HMAC), where the key used in calculating the HMAC is shared only between non-revoked OBUs. In addition, EMAP uses a novel probabilistic key distribution, which enables non-revoked OBUs to securely share and update a secret key. EMAP can significantly decrease the message loss ratio due to the message verification delay compared with the conventional authentication methods employing CRL.