A Lightweight Privacy-Preserving Authentication Protocol for VANETs

With the emergence of the concept of smart city and the increase of vehicles, the vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) is widely accepted for the communication of vehicles to get information including road condition, traffic congestion description, speed, and location of vehicles. Naturally, the security of the data transmission in VANET has become one of the urgent tasks of researchers. Many privacy-preserving authentication protocols for VANETs have been presented. However, heavy computations and security flaws exist in them. Thus, we put forward a lightweight authentication protocol in a suitable communication model for VANET that meets the privacy protection needs, with only hash functions and exclusive-OR operations. Formal security analysis using BAN logic shows that our protocol achieves the security goals. Proverif is used to verify the security of the protocol and the results show that the privacy can be guaranteed under the simulated attacker. Moreover, through security properties analysis, our protocol is robust enough to get rid of common attacks and keep the communication data secretly. The performance comparison results show that our protocol is lightweight and efficient. Furthermore, we simulate the network with SUMO and NS-3, and all show that our protocol is efficient and practical for VANETs.