SEGM: A secure group management framework in integrated VANET-cellular networks

Recently, the envisioned integration between vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) and cellular network can accommodate rich applications since integrated VANET-Cellular network enables mobile operators to provide vehicle users with seamless data access to the operators' services. In integrated VANET-Cellular networks, the clustering algorithms associating vehicles into groups can provide high performance data transmission service and have been widely studied. However, in most of the existing literature, the security issues in such a scenario cannot be taken into full consideration, which may decrease the reliability of the system, mainly including: 1) How to efficiently and securely set up and maintain a group; and 2) How to perform the secure group access management. For this end, we propose a secure group management framework in integrated VANET-Cellular networks, which consists of two schemes, i.e., SEGM-I and SEGM-II. SEGM-I is proposed for the fixed trusted member scenario, and SEGM-II is designed for a general case, i.e., dynamic untrusted member scenario. The SEGM can be divided into two phases: group setup and maintenance phase, and group access authentication phase. During group setup and maintenance phase, SEGM-II can dynamically maintain the group by using contributory group key agreement, supporting group joining, group leaving, group merging, and group partition. During group access authentication phase, we propose a lightweight group access authentication protocol based on message authentication code (MAC) aggregation technique with DoS attacks resistance. The proposed SEGM is communication-efficient and secure against hostile eavesdroppers as well as various other attacks specific to group settings. Finally, performance evaluations demonstrate its efficiency in terms of group management and access authentication overhead.