An Anonymous Conditional Privacy-Preserving Authentication Scheme for VANETs

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have been growing rapidly because it can improve traffic safety and efficiency in transportation. In VANETs, messages are broadcast in wireless environment, which is vulnerable to be attacked in many ways. Accordingly, it is essential to authenticate the legitimation of vehicles to guarantee the performance of services. In this paper, we propose an anonymous conditional privacy-preserving authentication scheme based on message authentication code (MAC) for VANETs. With verifiable secret sharing (VSS), vehicles can obtain a group key for message generation and authentication after a mutual authentication phase. Security analysis and performance evaluation show that the proposed scheme satisfies basic security and privacy-preserving requirements and has a better performance compared with some existing schemes in terms of computational cost and communication overhead.