A data security protocol for the Trusted Truck® system

Security has become one of the major concerns in the context of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). The Trusted Truck® system provides an efficient wireless communication mechanism for safe exchange of messages between moving vehicles (trucks) and roadside inspection stations. Vehicles and station are equipped with processing units but with different computational capabilities. To render data exchange in Trusted Truck® more secure, this paper proposes a secured data protocol which ensures data integrity, message authentication and non-repudiation. The uniqueness of the protocol is that it effectively exploits the asymmetry of computational resources. It is cost-effective, resource-efficient and is embedded within the Trusted Truck® environment without demanding any additional hardware infrastructure. The protocol balances the computational load between vehicles and stations by incorporating an innovative key transport mechanism. Digital signatures and encryption techniques are utilized for authentication and data confidentiality. Cryptography algorithms along with optimization methods are used for digital signatures. The execution time of the algorithms is analyzed along with clear demonstration of the benefits offered by the proposed scheme.