Performance and Scalability Assessment for Non-Certificate-Based Public Key Management in VANETs

Current research in secure messaging for Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) focuses on employing a digital certificate-based Public Key Cryptosystem (PKC) to support security. However, the security overhead of such a scheme creates a transmission delay and introduces a time-consuming verification process to VANET communications. This paper proposes a non-certificate-based public key management for VANETs. A comprehensive evaluation of performance and scalability of the proposed public key management regime is presented, which is compared with a certificate-based PKC by employing a number of quantified analyses and simulations. In this paper, the authors demonstrate that the proposal can maintain security and assert that it can improve overall performance and scalability at a lower cost, compared with certificate-based PKC. The proposed scheme adds a new dimension to key management and verification services for VANETs.