Anonymous Online Registration and Secure Authentication Protocol in Intelligent Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks

With the establishment of the Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), Vehicular Ad-hoc NETworks (VANETs) play great roles in improving traffic safety and efficiency. However, due to the openness and fragility of VANETs, they are vulnerable to various network threats and attacks, and thereby hindering the wide applications of VANETs. To address the requirements for authentication and integrity of transmitted data, identity privacy-preservation, an anonymous online registration and secure authentication protocol is proposed in intelligent VANETs. The protocol enables a vehicle to execute anonymous online registration in transportation systems Trusted Authority (TA) via a public channel. Once validating the real identity, TA can return the private key to the vehicle for subsequent secure authentication via public channel. Thus, the vehicle can generate an authenticated traffic message to a nearby RoadSide Unit (RSU) in real time, so that RSU performs the authentication and integrity verification. This protocol supports anonymous identity traceability, thus TA can revoke the real identity of a malicious vehicle, which has generated some forged messages and caused traffic jams or accidents. In addition, this protocol supports batch authentication and verification of those transmitted traffic messages from different anonymous vehicles. The detailed security analysis and performance evaluation have been conducted. The results demonstrate that the protocol has outstanding advantages on the computational costs of each vehicle and the communication overhead of RSU, and can realize anonymous online registration without establishing secure channel. Therefore, the protocol could be securely and efficiently deployed in intelligent VANETs.