Exploiting propagation effects for authentication and misbehavior detection in VANETs

Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) are a critical and potentially vulnerable target for attacks on both message integrity and authenticity. Existing approaches are based on computationally expensive digital signature, which also creates large message sizes due to the attachment of signatures and certificates to messages. This leads to high communication and verification overheads, both in terms of bandwidth and computational effort. In this paper we discuss an alternative approach to ensure message integrity using characteristics of the received signal for authentication and misbehavior detection.