A weight-based conditional privacy-preserving authentication scheme in software-defined vehicular network

The rapid development of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) has brought significant improvement to traffic safety and efficiency. However, owing to limitations associated with VANETs’ own unchanging model and traditional network structure, there are still many challenging concerns such as poor flexibility and controllability to deal with. To solve these inherent problems effectively, we propose a weight-based conditional anonymous authentication scheme by introducing the newly emerging software-defined networking (SDN) framework. Firstly, by making use of the global planning and dynamic management features of SDN, vehicles are classified into different priorities using weighted values to reduce communications redundancy, and control the participation of malicious vehicles. Then, an efficient conditional privacy-preserving scheme was developed to secure communications among vehicles. A two-step tracing approach has been designed to exclude and punish vehicles whose weights drop below the threshold. Extensive analyses indicate that our conditional privacy-preserving scheme is secure and has lower computation costs than conventional state-of-the-art authentication schemes.