  Transportation safety, one of the main driving forces of the development of
vehicular communication (VC) systems, relies on high-rate safety messaging
(beaconing). At the same time, there is consensus among authorities, industry,
and academia on the need to secure VC systems. With specific proposals in the
literature, a critical question must be answered: can secure VC systems be
practical and satisfy the requirements of safety applications, in spite of the
significant communication and processing overhead and other restrictions
security and privacy-enhancing mechanisms impose? To answer this question, we
investigate in this paper the following three dimensions for secure and
privacy-enhancing VC schemes: the reliability of communication, the processing
overhead at each node, and the impact on a safety application. The results
indicate that with the appropriate system design, including sufficiently high
processing power, applications enabled by secure VC can be in practice as
effective as those enabled by unsecured VC.
