A Secure, Privacy-Preserving, and Lightweight Authentication Scheme for VANETs

The vehicular network is a collection of vehicles and other components facilitated with versatile sensors to communicate, which is backboned by authentication. Present authentication protocols focus on either the lightweight feature or security. On the other hand, privacy during authentication is essential. Moreover, existing schemes are dependent on the trusted authority for checking the legitimacy of a communicating node, which suffers from the infrastructure-less scenario. Alternatively, existing protocols are dependent on a secure communication channel during the registration phase. To address these concerns, an elliptic curve cryptography-based authentication protocol has been designed. Moreover, a secure key establishment is shown in this paper. Pseudo-id-based authentication is used to provide the privacy-preservation on the scheme. On the other hand, symmetric-key cryptography with a session key is used for message encryption during communication. A security analysis on the proposed scheme using the BAN logic and AVISPA shows the protocol's resilience capabilities on various attacks. Alternatively, the mathematical proof of the protocol represents the proof of correctness. Moreover, extensive performance analysis with the existing authentication schemes shows that the proposed algorithm is better in computation cost, communication cost, and energy cost. Lastly, the NS3 simulation shows the packet data transfer among the nodes in the network.