Abstract: A vehicular Ad–hoc network (VANET) is an important component of intelligent transport system (ITS), and provides an eminent way to communicate with other nodes while driving. For vehicular communications (VC) a secure method must be employed for message and data dissemination. Various encryption and decryption schemes have been devised so far for message communication in VANET. Earlier symmetric and asymmetric encryption techniques were employed in VANET for secure communication but it has many inherent shortcomings so a new encryption standard known as functional encryption scheme has been used in VANET. In this paper a comparison of various encryption schemes i.e. symmetric/ asymmetric and various functional encryption schemes has been done to reveal the utility of functional encryption in VANET. Although functional encryption scheme has many subgroups but in this paper two major subgroups of functional encryption i.e. predicate encryption (PE) and Attribute based encryption (ABE) are compared to reveal the benefits of each scheme.

Keywords: VANET, Encryption, Security, Vehicular Communication.