A lightweight secure mobile Payment protocol for vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs)

In the last few years, many value-added applications (such as Payment services) in Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANETs) have emerged. Although these applications offer great business opportunities they also introduce new concerns regarding security and privacy. Moreover, the wide range of scenarios (with or without connectivity restrictions) arising from vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-roadside communications have opened up new security challenges which must be considered by Payment system designers to achieve the same security capabilities independent of the scenario where Payment occurs. We designed and implemented a lightweight (using symmetric-key operations which requires low computational power) secure Payment protocol for those scenarios in VANETs and other mobile environments where the Merchant cannot communicate directly with the Acquirer (the Merchant's financial institution) to process the Payment Request. We also present practical performance results that can be achieved with the proposed Payment protocol.