A Cost-Efficient Anonymous Authenticated and Key Agreement Scheme for V2I-Based Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks

The rise of smart cities is directly connected to the increasing use of vehicles. The growing vehicle utilization has driven the emergence of Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs), facilitating instant information exchange among vehicles. The system provides essential information regarding road conditions, traffic patterns, and more relevant data. VANETs encompass two fundamental categories of communication exchanges, namely Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I). V2I technology facilitates the integration of cars and transportation infrastructure, enabling effective communication between vehicles and infrastructure. Nevertheless, the potential of V2I communication has various security concerns arising from prevalent security threats. Current authentication techniques encounter challenges regarding complexity, security, and privacy considerations. We designed a hash-based lightweight and anonymous authentication scheme to address the aforementioned restrictions and enhance the effectiveness of authentication in V2I architecture. This scheme effectively combines identity, password, and bio-metric to enhance resistance against impersonation, denial of service, and privileged insider attacks. The devised scheme distinguishes itself by a comparative analysis and security proofs, highlighting its superior capability in guaranteeing secure authentication in V2I communication. The comprehensive security analysis conducted formally and informally showcases the robustness of the proposed solution against several threats. The performance evaluation results show that our scheme demonstrates a decrease in the computational cost of 51.40% approximately and a reduction in communication overhead of around 22.57%. These results establish the efficiency and scalability of the proposed scheme as a viable solution for V2I architecture.