| Security and privacy are among the growing concerns of a Vehicular Ad hoc Network (VANET) which requires a high degree of liability from its participants. In this dissertation, We address security, anonymity and privacy challenges of VANETs in the light of the IEEE standards for vehicular communications.;VANET provides a variety of road-safety and other applications through wireless devices installed in vehicles and roadside infrastructure. A roadside infrastructure in VANET is generally public, and is prone to several different malicious attacks including node compromise, impersonation, and false message delivery attacks. Therefore, a user of a VANET must verify the integrity of a message that is delivered from a roadside infrastructure. On the other hand, a vehicle-originated message should be anonymous in order to ensure user-privacy in a VANET. However, a vehicle must not be able to take advantage of its anonymity for any misbehavior like sending false messages or malicious updates to other vehicles or a roadside infrastructure. We use proxy signature, identity-based signature, and elliptic curve cryptosystems to provide authentication for infrastructure generated messages, and anonymous authentication for vehicle originated messages.;Authentication in a dense traffic condition is a challenge for a receiving entity as it incurs a processing delay at the receiving end. We address this issue with a dynamic approach that selectively verifies received messages based on a message's MAC-layer priority and a sender's information relevance. This approach makes a trade-off between priority and fairness in vehicular message authentication.;We develop a network simulator to measure the impact of our authentication schemes over a WAVE protocol stack. Also, we investigate how some of the MAC-layer weaknesses may impair the security of a VANET. Our solutions are lightweight, bandwidth friendly and compatible to the current standards of vehicular communications. |
