An efficient and secure mobile payment protocol for restricted connectivity scenarios in vehicular ad hoc network

Value-added applications in vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) come with the emergence of electronic trading. The restricted connectivity scenario in VANET, where the vehicle cannot communicate directly with the bank for authentication due to the lack of internet access, opens up new security challenges. Hence a secure payment protocol, which meets the additional requirements associated with VANET, is a must. In this paper, we propose an efficient and secure payment protocol that aims at the restricted connectivity scenario in VANET. The protocol applies self-certified key agreement to establish symmetric keys, which can be integrated with the payment phase. Thus both the computational cost and communication cost can be reduced. Moreover, the protocol can achieve fair exchange, user anonymity and payment security.