Abstract
Since Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are
vulnerable to various kinds of attacks, there is a need to
fulfill the security requirements like message privacy,
integrity, and authentication. The authentication technique
is said to be efficient if it detects compromised nodes
accurately with less complexity, reduced authentication
delay, and keying overhead. In this paper, a trust-based
authentication scheme for cluster-based VANETs is proposed.
The vehicles are clustered, and the trust degree of
each node is estimated. The trust degree is a combination
of direct trust degree and indirect trust degree. Based on
this estimated trust degree, cluster heads are selected.
Then, each vehicle is monitored by a set of verifiers, and
the messages are digitally signed by the sender and
encrypted using a public/ private key as distributed by a
trusted authority and decrypted by the destination. This
verifies the identity of sender as well as receiver thus
providing authentication to the scheme. By simulation
results, we prove that the proposed technique provides high
security with less overhead and delay.