An Efficient Authentication Scheme with Privacy Preserving for Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) provide opportunities to exchange traffic information among vehicles and infrastructures enhancing the transportation safety and driving experiences. Due to the criticality of exchanged information, message authentication which will not expose the privacy of vehicles is required. The majority of current authentication schemes for VANETs depend primarily on public-key cryptography which brings extra overhead in terms of delay and requires infrastructure support for certificate verification. Symmetric-key based techniques can be more efficient, but they introduce significant key maintenance overheads. In this paper, the authors propose an efficient and lightweight symmetric-key based authentication scheme for VANETs based on group communication. The authors analyze the security properties of our proposed schemes to show the applicability when there is little or no infrastructure support. In addition, the proposed scheme was implemented and tested with real-world vehicle data. Simulation results confirmed the efficiency in terms of delay with respect to other proposed techniques.