Efficient Privacy-Preserving Anonymous Authentication Protocol for Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks

Vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) has been considered as one of the most promising wireless sensor technologies, which could enhance driving convenience and traffic efficiency through real-time information interaction. Nevertheless, emerging security issues (e.g., confidentiality, integrity, identity privacy, message authentication) will hinder the widespread deployment of VANETs. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose an efficient privacy-preserving anonymous authentication protocol for VANETs. We first design an identity-based signature algorithm, and exploit it with an account information of a vehicle to propose our anonymous authentication protocol. The protocol enables each vehicle to anonymously send an authenticated message to nearby roadside units (RSUs) in a confidential way, and efficiently check the feedback information from nearby RSUs. Simultaneously, the protocol achieves key-exchange functionality, which could produce a session key for later secure communication between vehicles and RSUs. Finally, we give the security analysis of the proposed protocol and conduct a comprehensive performance evaluation, the results demonstrate its feasibility in the secure deployment of VANETs.