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PV+TESLA: A Secure Integrated Approach to Reduce Message Verification Delay in V2V Networks

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Abstract

Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) broadcast communication plays a crucial role in ensuring road safety in Intelligent Transport System (ITS) domain, but ensuring the authenticity and integrity of exchanged messages used by safety applications presents challenges. While the Timed Efficient Stream Loss-tolerant Authentication (TESLA) offers low computation overhead as it is primarily built on symmetric cryptographic primitives like MAC and hash chain technique, its inherent authentication delay may exceed the tolerable latency for future safety applications. To address these issues, we propose the Prompt Verification (PV) model, a modified version of TESLA which eliminates authentication delay by broadcasting the verification key with the message. Although the PV model provides benefits such as faster message verification and prevention of memory-based DoS attacks, it introduces a vulnerability exploitable by malicious users. To mitigate this vulnerability, we conduct a comprehensive analysis, evaluating its significance through a developed threat model and risk analysis framework. Our findings underscore the substantial risk posed by impersonation attacks, which could endanger lives and property. To counter these risks, we propose to integrate PV with TESLA, complemented by RSSI based message consistency checking scheme (RMCCS) for enhanced lightweight false message detection. Simulation results demonstrate an 85% reduction in authentication delays compared with standard TESLA and existing schemes, along with increased resilience against impersonation attacks. The PV+TESLA model, integrated with RMCCS, offers a robust solution for securing safety messages in V2V broadcast communication systems, showcasing its practical viability and effectiveness.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Birmingham City University, Birmingham, B4 7XG, UK

    Mujahid Muhammad

  2. University of Bedfordshire, Luton, LU1 3JU, UK

    Ghazanfar Ali Safdar

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Contributions

We confirm that listed authors have made following contributions. Mujahid Muhammad wrote initial draft, performed simulations and initial results followed by formal security analysis. Ghazanfar Ali Safdar thoroughly revised the manuscript, added diagrams related to prompt verification vulnerability assessment, refined discussion and analysis section, added and refined paper structure for ease of reading, and improved overall paper presentation including detailed discussion about the results. Ghazanfar Ali Safdar finally has made the paper ready for submission and is the corresponding author too.

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Correspondence to Ghazanfar Ali Safdar.

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Muhammad, M., Safdar, G.A. PV+TESLA: A Secure Integrated Approach to Reduce Message Verification Delay in V2V Networks. J Netw Syst Manage 33, 32 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10922-025-09910-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10922-025-09910-7

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