International Journal of Information Technology and Knowledge Management

July-December 2010, Volume 2, No. 2, pp. 591-594

Secure Message Communication using Digital Signatures and

Attribute Based Cryptographic Method in VANET
Sandhya Kohli1 & Rakesh Dhiman2

The Vehicles will become increasingly intelligent in the near future, they will be equipped with radio interfaces. Security
and privacy are the two primary concerns in the design of Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANET). Poorly designed VANET
causes serious attacks on the network and jeopardize the goal of increased driving safety. While designing VANET security
features, it must ensure that no third party can collect private information about drivers. This paper provides a way by which
message authenticity is improved by combining two schemes digital signatures and attribute based cryptographic schemes.
Keywords: VANET, Certification Authority, RSU, Public Key Infrastructure, Attributes.

1. INTRODUCTION
Traffic congestion on the roads is today a large problem in
big cities. Issues related to accidents, driver safety and
congestion pose a threat to not only to human life but to
our environment also, other negative consequences are
energy wastage, leakage of secret information. Until
recently road Vehicles were the realm of mechanical
engineers, but with the emergence of VANET the vehicles
are becoming Computer on Wheels. A modern car
consists of tens of interconnected processor, usually known
as EDR (Event Data Recorder), GPS (Global positioning
system) a receiver, a navigator system and several radars.
For vehicular communication in US the FCC has allocated
a bandwidth of 75 MHz, which is referred as DSR
(Dedicated short Range Communication). The selforganizing operation and unique features of Vehicular
communication is a double edge sword i.e. a rich set of
tools is offered to drivers and authorities but a [5] formidable
set of abuses and attacks are also becomes possible. Hence
the security of vehicular network is indispensable because
otherwise these systems could make antisocial and criminal
behavior easier. Due to tight coupling between applications
with rigid requirements and the networking fabric makes
the vehicular security hard to achieve.

a.

Disruption of Network Operation or Denial of

Service (DOS) Attack: In this case the main aim of
attacker is to prevent the network from carrying out
safety related function. The DOS attack, which
includes jamming the wireless channel, thus
interrupts all communications. In Transit Traffic
Tampering in DOS also proves very fatal because
in this any node acts as a relay and can disrupt
communication of other nodes. It can drop or
corrupt messages.

b.

ID Disclosure: This attack includes Id disclosure

of other vehicles in order to track their location.
This is Big Brother Scenario where global observer
can monitor trajectories of targeted vehicles and use
this data for range of purpose. The attacker in this
case is passive, it does not make use of cameras,
physical pursuit or onboard tacking device to
uncover the identity of his target.

c.

Hidden Vehicle Attacks: In this attack a vehicle

broadcasting warnings will listen for feed back from
its neighbor and stop its broadcast if it realizes that
one of its neighbors is better positioned for warning
other vehicles. This reduces congestion on wireless
channel. In the hidden vehicle attack an attacker
vehicle behaves like a neighbor vehicle placed at a
better position for message forwarding, thus leading
to silencing of original vehicle and making hidden,
thereby introduces the false information into the
network.

d.

Wormhole Attacks: In wireless networking the

wormhole attack consist of tunneling packets
between two remote nodes. An attacker that controls
at least two entities remote from each other and a
high speed communication link between them can
tunnel packets broadcasted in one location to

2. IDENTIFYING VARIOUS ATTACKS

The nature and resources of adversary [5] will largely
determine the scope of defense needed to secure vehicular
networks. In this section we describe the various security
threats faced by vehicular networks. The various types of
Attacks in Vehicular communications (VC) are:
1

Lecturer, RIMT Mandi Gobindgarh, Punjab, INDIA

Astt Prof., M.M. University, Mullana, Ambala, Haryana, INDIA

Email: [email protected], [email protected]

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SANDHYA KOHLI & RAKESH DHIMAN

another, thus introducing erroneous messages in

the destination area.

authorities or the manufacturer. Moreover, ELPs

are fixed and accompany the vehicle for the long
duration while anonymous keys sets have to be
periodically renewed after their lifetime expired.

3. VARIOUS HARDWARE PROPOSED FOR VC

The successful deployment of inter vehicular
communication requires [6] a robust and secured
mechanism. Like in many areas of networking inter vehicle
communication (IVC) is also prone to set of abuses and
security related attacks. The security of vehicular networks
is indispensable because misbehavior in these systems could
lead to anti social and criminal tasks easier. In this step some
of the hardware used in security is described.
The various components used to protect Vehicular
communication against wide range of threats are: Event data
recorder (EDR), Tamper Proof Device (TPD), Electronic
License plates, vehicular PKI.
a. Event Data Recorder (EDR): EDRs will be used in
vehicles to register to all parameters especially
during critical situations like accidents. Data stored
in EDR will be used for crash reconstruction and
to verify the reason for casualty. EDR also used to
collect information related to driving habits like
average speed and no. of driving hours.
b.

c.

Temper Proof Device (TPD): The user of secret

information like private keys incurs the need for a
TPD in each vehicle. TPD will keep the material
safe from attackers thus decreasing the possibility
of the information leakage. Since car electronics
is vulnerable to attacks especially the data buses,
which are responsible for transferring information
and control commands between the different
electronic components of a vehicle. The TPD
device will take care of signing and verifying
messages so that they cannot be altered if the data
buses are hacked. To provide security the TPD has
its own battery, which can be recharged from the
vehicles.
Electronic License Plate (ELP): ELPs are unique
cryptographically verifiable numbers that will be
used as traditional license plates. The advantage
of ELPs is that they will automate the paper based
document checkups of vehicles. It will help in
detection of stolen cars, identifying vehicles on
crossing country borders or during annual technical
checkups. An ELP is issued by government or an
Electronic chassis no. (ECN) issued by vehicle
manufacturer [1]. Since the ELPs are the electronic
equivalent of physical license plate, it should be
installed in the vehicle by using similar procedure,
which is followed by government transportation
authority at the time of vehicle registration.
Anonymous keys are preloaded by transportation

d.

Vehicular PKI: A PKI (Public Key Infrastructure)

is typical [3], security architecture used for
networks where the presence of online authorities
is not always guaranteed. A Vehicular PKI is a good
choice for enabling IVC security. In VPKI, each
vehicle is equipped with one or more private/public
Key pairs certified by certification authorities. So
that a message sender will use the private keys to
generate digital signatures on messages that need
to be certified and message receivers will have
corresponding public key to verify the validity of
messages. Although this architecture seems very
convenient for vehicular networks, but some
problems still exists. One of them is key
distribution, which allows message receiver to
obtain the public keys of message senders. Other
problem is certificate revocation by certification
authority (CA), which invalidates some public/
private key pairs. A third problem of PKI is
increased overhead in terms of digital signature
sizes and verification, transmission delays.

4. SECURITY MECHANISMS FOR MESSAGE AUTHENTION

a. Digital Signatures: The simplest and the most efficient
method is to assign each vehicle a set of public/private key
pair that will allow the vehicle [5] to digitally sign messages
and authenticate itself to receivers. Due to the liability issue
present in VANET, a self-trust management approach such
as PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) is not satisfactory. These
public keys should be issued and signed by a trusted
authority. The certificate issued by a authority implies the
use of PKI. Under the PKI solution each vehicle send a safety
message, sign it with its private key and includes the CAs
(Certification Authority) Certificate as
V *:M, SigPrKV [M|T], CertV
Where V designate the sending vehicle, * represents all
the messages receivers, M is a message, | is the concatenation
operator and T is the timestamp to ensure message freshness,
CertV is the public key certificate of vehicle. The receivers
of message extract and verify the public key of vehicle using
the certificate and then verify the signature by using its
certified public key. If the messages send in emergency
context then this message along with signature and
certificate should be stored in the EDR for further potential
investigation in the emergency.
b. Attribute based Cryptographic Schemes: Proposed
security solutions by using traditional public key
cryptography are not very flexible [2], in providing specified

SECURE MESSAGE COMMUNICATION

USING

DIGITAL SIGNATURES

AND

ATTRIBUTE BASED CRYPTOGRAPHIC METHOD

levels of privacy. Symmetric Keys solution proposed are also

not suitable for delay sensitive vehicle-to-vehicle
communication. So various cryptographic schemes based
on users attributes have been proposed. User Identities like
name, email address are often used [4] to access several
information sources .The encryptor restricts the decryptor
to indicate the identity of the decryptor. The hierarchy of
these schemes is as follows:
4.1. Identity Based Encryption Scheme (IBE)
IBE was first proposed by Shamir in 1984, this mechanism
provides authentication, confidentiality, message integrity,
non repudiation and pseudonymity. IBE scheme was
originally used to simplify certificate management in email
systems. The identity based encryption scheme is specified
by four algorithms: Setup, Extract, Encrypt, and Decrypt
Setup: It takes security parameter k and returns system
parameter with master key. The system parameters include
a description of finite message space M and description of
finite cipher text space C. These system parameters will be
publicly known whereas the master key will be known only
to private key generator (PKG).
Extract: This phase takes input from system
parameters, master key and arbitrary ID and returns a private
key d. Here ID is the arbitrary stream that will be used as
public key and d is the corresponding private decryption
key. So the extract phase generate private key from the given
public key.
Encrypt: Input parameter for this phase are system
parameters, ID, M, with these parameter it will generate the
cipher text C.
Decrypt: It takes input parameters like system
parameters cipher text C and private key d and returns the
original message M. These algorithms must satisfy the
standard consistency constraints i.e. the private key d must
be generated through Extract phase when it is supplied with
ID as the public key.
4.2. Attribute Based Encryption Scheme (ABE)
ABE has been envisioned as a promising cryptographic
primitive for realizing secure and flexible access control.
In ABE [2], the encryption keys or cipher texts are labeled
with sets of descriptive attributes defined for the system
users. In this scheme attributes act as the basic properties of
vehicles for access control and secure group
communications. Attributes describe the role of VANET
communication participants. Attributes abstract entity and
data trust at a certain level and they can be used to identify
a group of entities In ABE a users identity is composed of
set S of strings, which act as descriptive attributes for users.
ABE system also leverage threshold construction where a
user with identity S will be able to decrypt a message if it

IN

VANET

593

has at least K attributes that overlap with a set S chosen by

encryptor. ABE scheme is often criticized for its high scheme
overhead due to the requirement of extensive pairing
operation. ABE scheme is of two types KP-ABE and CPABE.
4.2.1. Key Pair Attribute Based Encryption (KP-ABE)
KP-ABE is a cryptographic primitive [1] which enables fine
grained access control over sensitive data so KP-ABE was
proposed to resolve the problem of fine grained data access
control in one to many communications. In KP-ABE a cipher
text is associated with a set of attributes and each users
secret key is embedded with an access structure, which is
the logic combination of certain set of attributes. User can
decrypt a cipher text if the set of attributes are associated
with cipher text satisfies the access structure embedded in
their secret keys. KP-ABE also provides collusion resistance
and provable security under standard difficult assumptions.
There are certain issues, which impede its direct application
in targeted broadcast system. The KP-ABE secret key is
defined over the access structure and does not have one to
one correspondence with any particular users. Thus a paid
user is able to share his secret key and abuse his access
privilege without being identifying. This is known as Key
Abuse Attack. The ideal way for defending against key abuse
attacks is to technically prevent illegal users from using
others decryption keys.
4.2.2. Cipher Text -Policy Attribute Based Encryption
(CP-ABE)
In several distributed systems a user is able to access the
data if it possesses a certain set of credentials or attributes
[4]. One method to enforce such policy is to employ a trusted
server to store data and mediate access control. If any server
storing the data is compromised, then the confidentiality of
the data will be compromised. By using CP-ABE scheme
encrypted data can be kept confidential even if the storage
server is untrusted. It also secures the data against collusion
attacks. In this scheme users private key is associated with
arbitrary number of attributes expressed as strings. When a
party encrypts a message using CP-ABE system they specify
the associated access structure over attributes. User will be
able to decrypt a cipher-text if user attributes pass through
cipher texts access structure. CP-ABE scheme consist of
four phases: Setup, Encryption, Key Generation, and
Decryption.
5. CONCLUSION
A comparison of various attribute based cryptographic
schemes for message authentication is done on the basis of
Dynamicity i.e. whether the attributes are dynamic in nature
or not. Computation overhead is more in case of IBE & KPABE schemes where as overhead incurred in case of CP-

594

SANDHYA KOHLI & RAKESH DHIMAN

ABE is minimum. Both the KP-ABE & CP-ABE schemes

provide collusion security. KP-ABE scheme suffers from
the key abuse attack where as CP-ABE scheme do not have
any affect of this attack. So it is concluded from table 1.
that CP-ABE is better technique as compared to IBE & KPABE.
Table 1
Comparison of Various Attribute
Based Cryptographic Methods
Overhead in terms of

IBE

KP-ABE

CP-ABE

Does not exist

Exist

Exist

Overhead caused by
Operation Extensive
pairing

Yes

Yes

No

Provides Collusion
Security

No

Yes

Yes

Key Abuse Attack

Does not exist

Exist

Does not exist

Dynamic Property

6. FUTURE PROSPECTS
To provide secure Vehicular Communication in both the
scenarios (V2V AND V2I) digital signatures as well as
attribute based cryptographic methods should be used in a
hand-shaking manner to provide message authenticity. The
security of group and sub group communication is based
on the private key component generated by RSU. The
certificate based mutual authentication procedure is
performed when a vehicle enters in the coverage area of
RSU. The RSU coverage range hinders the attackers
behavior. In this case digital signatures provide the message
authenticity. But to protect vehicle from Sybil attack there
is a need of attribute based cryptographic methods. These

methods prevent the adversary to generate valid signatures

for the cipher text transmitted to other vehicles as a result
attacker will not have genuine vehicles private keys and thus
attacker will be failed to impersonate another valid user.
Using attribute based cryptographic methods alone does not
prevent attackers from encrypting a message containing a
set of attributes because both attributes and encrypting
parameters are publicly known, therefore a digital signature
scheme must be incorporated with attribute based
cryptographic methods for message authentication.
REFRENCES
[1]

Dan Boneh, Matthew Franklin, Identity-Based Encryption

from the Weil Pairing, in Proceedings of Crypto 2001,
Volume 2139 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Pages
213-229, Springer-Verlag, 2001.

[2]

Dijiang Huang, Mayank Verma, ASPE : Attribute-based

Secure Policy Enforcement in Vehicular Ad hoc Networks,
from Journal on Ad hoc Networks 7, 2009, 1526-1535.

[3]

Kargal, F. Papadimitratos, P. Buttyan, L. Muter, M. Schoch,

E. Wiedersheim, B. Ta-Vinh Thong Calandriello, G. Held,
A. Kung, A. Hubaux, J. -P. Ulm Univ., Ulm Secure
Vehicular Communication Systems: Implementation,
Performance and Research Challenges, IEEE
Communication Magazine, 46, Issue: 11, November 2008.

[4]

Keita Emura, Atsuko Miyaji and Kazumasa Omote,

A Dynamic Attribute-Based Group Signature Scheme and
Its Application in Anonymous Survey for the Collection of
Attribute Statistics, Journal of Information Processing, 17:
216-231 (2009).

[5]

Maxim Raya, Panos Papadimitratos, and Jean-pierre

Habaux, EPFL, Securing Vehicular Communications,
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