Secure message communication among vehicles using elliptic curve cryptography in smart cities

Message exchange among vehicles is an integral part of communication in smart cities. Messages are exchanged to inform the other vehicles about emergency situations such as-safety alerts, and location privacy. Due to the usage of an insecure wireless medium, malicious activities in vehicles, i.e., illegal use of the false messages, can astray other vehicles. Security in communication among the vehicles can be provided by encrypting the messages using various security keys. However, it has been found from the literature that existing schemes for secure communication require large key size, and therefore may these schemes may not be applicable to smart cities. To address these issues, a secure message communication scheme among vehicles based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) is proposed. The proposed scheme needs smaller key size leading to mathematically simple and cost effective solution. Furthermore, the scheme provides mutual authentication, confidentiality, and forward secrecy. Security analysis prove that the proposed scheme is suitable to be adapted in smart city environment.