Threshold-based secure and privacy-preserving message verification in VANETs

Messages spreading inside vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) generally need to achieve the property of verifiability and content integrity, while preserving user privacy. Otherwise, VANETs will either fall into chaos, or prevent users from embracing it. To achieve this goal, we propose a protocol, which contains a priori and posteriori countermeasures, to guarantee these features. The a priori process firstly verifies that each message is sent by a vehicle only once. Then it collects and checks whether the count of the message exceeds the threshold value to improve the trustworthiness of the message. The posteriori process verifies the integrity of the message, ensuring it is unchanged during transmission between the vehicle and the road side unit. The privacy is preserved by applying group signature. In case of disruptive events, the proposed solution can trace back to the source vehicle which generates the message.