Provably Secure and Anonymous V2I and V2V Authentication Protocol for VANETs

Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) enable the connection and information exchange between vehicles and transportation infrastructure (V2I), vehicle and vehicle (V2V) to improve the safety and efficiency of the transportation system. In previous protocols, V2I and V2V authentication protocols based on bilinear pairings or identity-based cryptography are computationally heavy or difficult to protect the user’s identity and privacy. In addition, lightweight authentication protocols have not achieve both V2I and V2V authentication, and may suffer from Onboard Unit (OBU) intrusion attacks, Roadside Unit (RSU) captured attacks, and difficult to track malicious vehicles. Therefore, a lightweight and anonymous V2I and V2V authentication protocol with batch verification based on Elliptic Curves Cryptography (ECC) is proposed. We use Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) and biological key to avoid RSU captured attacks and OBU intrusion attacks, design a feature embedding strategy with dynamic pseudo-identity to recover the malicious vehicle’s identity by the Trusted Authority (TA). In the application test simulating the actual scenario, our protocol is more efficient because of lower overhead and batch authentication strategy. The semantic security of the protocol is formally proved under the random oracle model. The comparative analysis and security proof results show that our protocol is more superior to others.