A pseudonym-based certificateless privacy-preserving authentication scheme for VANETs

With the rapid development of wireless communication technology, Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs) is gradually becoming a key component for establishing core applications such as smart cities and the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). However, due to the wireless multi-hop communication, VANETs is vulnerable to attacks. Therefore, the implementation of legitimacy authentication and conditional privacy preserving among entities in VANETs is a necessary prerequisite to ensure the security of VANETs. This paper proposes a secure and efficient conditional privacy preserving scheme for VANETs. Under the premise of guaranteeing the conditional privacy in VANETs, the anonymous authentication scheme is constructed by combining the pseudonym-based mechanism and the certificateless signature mechanism. Moreover, the scheme has great advantages in fast revocation of vehicles, and ensures that the pseudonyms cannot be linked before being traced. Security analysis proves that the proposed scheme is able to meet the privacy protection requirements in VANETs. In addition, the performance evaluation shows that the efficiency of the proposed scheme is significantly improved compared with the state-of -art schemes.(c) 2022 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.