This chapter explores ways to use fast symmetric cryptography to protect vehicular communications, but without direct involvement of RSUs. It focuses on the timed efficient stream loss-tolerant authentication (TESLA) authentication protocol, which is commonly used in securing broadcast and multicast communication. In addition, since only a short message authentication code (MAC) tag is attached to each message, the extra message length and the bandwidth overhead due to the security mechanism can be significantly reduced.
The chapter presents the design of a TESLA-based broadcast authentication scheme for vehicular communication, termed TSVC. It begins by providing a brief introduction to the techniques used here, which serve as the basis for the proposed scheme, and then presents the scheme. Finally, the chapter analyzes security through rigorous analysis and conducts performance evaluations through extensive simulation.