A secure vehicle-to-roadside communication payment protocol in vehicular ad hoc networks

Advances in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have triggered the development of many new attractive applications such as payment services which require the design of payment systems that satisfy additional requirements associated with VANETs. The wide range of scenarios (with or without connectivity restriction) arising from vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-roadside communications have opened up new security challenges which must be considered by payment systems designers to achieve the same security capabilities independently of the scenario where the payment occurs. We propose a payment protocol aimed at those scenarios where the client cannot communicate directly with the issuer (client’s financial institution) for authentication purpose. The proposed protocol uses a non-traditional digital signature scheme that reduces the communication cost (compared to certificate-based signature schemes), and increases the efficiency of the payment process (due to the low communications costs involved). Our protocol supports both credit-card and debit-card transactions, and protects the real identity of clients during the payment and can be used by any portable device.