Wireless Channel-Based Message Authentication

Inter-vehicle communication has attracted a lot of attention in the past. A major concern is the security and especially the integrity and authenticity of messages. Current standards and proposals in literature leverage asymmetric cryptographic mechanisms to achieve this, which is costly both in terms of consumed computational power, bandwidth, and introduced delay. We present a novel idea to use physical characteristics of the wireless channel to verify subsequent messages after initial trust in a first message has been established cryptographically. In this paper, we sketch the concept and provide a first evaluation on its potential for saving named resources.