A novel lightweight authentication and privacy-preserving protocol for vehicular ad hoc networks

Vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is commonly employed in intelligent transportation system (ITS) that allows the exchange of traffic data among vehicles and nearby environment to accomplish effective driving experience. Privacy and security are the challenging issues that exist in the safety needs of the VANET. Any particular leakage of the vehicle details such as route data might result in serious impacts, and therefore, authentication and privacy-preserving protocols are needed to enhance safety in VANET. With this motivation, this paper presents a new lightweight authentication and privacy-preserving protocol using improved timed efficient stream loss-tolerant authentication with cuckoo filter (ITESLA-CF) for VANETs. The proposed model encompasses different stages of operations such as initialization, registration, mutual authentication, broadcast and verification, and vehicle revocation phases. In addition, the ITESLA-CF technique has effective broadcast authentication as TESLA with minimal memory requirement. Besides, the ITESLA-CF technique includes a cuckoo filter to save the authentic information of vehicles that exist in the RSU’s range. The proposed model has lightweight mutual authentication among the parties and it offers robust anonymity to accomplish privacy and resists ordinary attacks. To ensure the better performance of the ITESLA-CF technique, an extensive set of simulations take place and the results are assessed in terms of different measures. The resultant experimental values pointed out the supremacy of the ITESLA-CF technique over the recent state of art methods.