DPB-MA: Low-Latency Message Authentication Scheme Based on Distributed Verification and Priority in Vehicular Ad Hoc Network

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) serve as crucial means to ensure safe transportation systems and enhance driving convenience. Ensuring authentication between vehicles and units is the most essential line of defense for VANETs systems. Various schemes of message authentication are put forward to realize safe communication in VANETs. However, these schemes mainly pay attention to privacy and security issues, and are not fit for high-density traffic environments where many messages should be verified by a roadside unit (RSU). At present, achieving the low-latency authentication under the security and privacy of messages remains a critical requirement and challenge. For addressing this problem, this study puts forward a novel low-latency message authentication scheme based on the distributed authentication and message priority (DPB-MA), which can minimize message verification latency through cooperation between the RSU and cooperative vehicles (CVs). In addition, a message priority strategy has been designed to ensure that urgent messages are preferentially verified. According to the security proof with tight reduction, the DPB-MA is existentially unforgeable against adaptive chosen message attack (EU-CMA) in the random oracle model (ROM). Furthermore, our DPB-MA achieves full message aggregation, which also greatly optimizes the communication overhead and authentication efficiency. Performance analysis indicates that our scheme works well in high-density traffic scenarios and is more suitable for securing emergency messages with ultra-low latency requirements.