Enhancing safety communication in autonomous vehicles with hybrid elliptic curve digital signatures

Abstract

The autonomous vehicles (AVs) are a part of vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) technology which is gaining a lot of researchers' attention for making the vehicle smarter and safer. In VANETs, the vehicles transmit various types of messages, some are important in terms of human lives while others are for infotainment. These messages give various information to the driver so that the driver can take appropriate precautions on the roads. In this work, the main aim was to concentrate on the safety messages that are very important in VANET infrastructure. In VANET the information transmitted are open, hence it is very easy for any attacker to manipulate or change the critical messages. Hence, in this paper, we intend to implement security to these safety messages by encrypting the elliptic curve digital signature algorithm (ECDSA) algorithm which is further optimized by ate pairing. The results have been compared with the traditional ECDSA in terms of throughput. By using the hybrid ECDSA, we increase the strength of ECDSA and still maintain the integrity of ECDSA, making sure that the authenticity of the vehicles and privacy of the messages is maintained within the VANET infrastructure.