Abstract
VANETs are networks of connected intelligent vehicles that can communicate with each other, as well as with infrastructure and fixed roadside equipment. As a result of the lack of fixed infrastructure and open-access environment, security is crucial when sending packets. Secure routing protocols have been proposed for VANETs, but most are focused on authenticating nodes and creating a secure route, without considering confidentiality after the route is created. Using a chain of source keys validated by a one-way function, we have proposed a secure routing protocol called Secure Greedy Highway Routing Protocol (GHRP), which provides increased confidentiality over other protocols. As part of the proposed protocol, the source, destination, and intermediate nodes are authenticated using a hashing chain in the first stage, and in the second stage, one-way hashing has been used to increase data security. In order to resist routing attacks such as black hole attacks, the proposed protocol is based on the GHRP routing protocol. The proposed protocol is simulated using the NS2 simulator, and its performance is compared with that of the SAODV protocol. Based on the simulation results, the proposed protocol performs better than the mentioned protocol in terms of packet delivery rate, overhead, and average end-to-end delay.