Flexible, Extensible, and Efficient VANET Authentication

The authentication of VANET messages continues to be an important research challenge. Although much research has been conducted in the area of message authentication in wireless networks, VANETs pose unique challenges, such as real-time constraints, processing limitations, memory constraints, requirements for interoperability with existing standards, extensibility and flexibility for future requirements, etc. No currently proposed technique addresses all of these requirements. After analyzing the requirements for viable VANET authentication, the authors propose a modified version of TESLA, TESLA++, which provides the same computationally efficient broadcast authentication as TESLA with reduced memory requirements.