A Decentralized Lightweight Authentication and Privacy Protocol for Vehicular Networks

Recently many security protocols have been proposed for road safety applications in Vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications. Most of them, however, do not fully satisfy the requirements of light-weight and fast processing, which are special properties for V2X. Most of the previous authentication protocols assume that a Certificate Authority (CA) is present within the communication range from all the vehicles, which is not practical for moving vehicles. We propose a light-weight security protocol for authentication and privacy protection for V2X. It employs two security hardware devices, Biometric Device (BD) and Tamper Proof Device (TPD), which verifies the driver and securely keeps the keys, respectively. It decentralizes the CA's tasks by locally generating pseudo-identity and private keys to preserve privacy and provide authentication in Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication. In addition, we propose an authentication signature protocol using a notion of hash-chain key generation. We implemented the proposed key generation and authentication protocol using NS-3 simulator. Our extensive simulations demonstrated that the proposed authentication protocol significantly enhances the security level while protecting the conditional privacy of vehicles by utilizing anonymous identities. The proposed protocol has a 20% ~ 85% less communication overhead compared with the previous protocols.