An Anonymous Authentication With Received Signal Strength Based Pseudonymous Identities Generation for VANETs

Anonymous authentication system enables mobile users to anonymously authenticate themselves to an authorized entity such as a Group Manager (GM) without revealing any privacy information. It provides unlinkable but accountable communications as well. These features are useful for wireless mobile networks implementation including vehicle ad-hoc networks (VANETs). However, performance of the system has to be sufficient reliable which may be existing systems have not dealt with yet. In this paper, we propose pseudonymous-based anonymous authentication between participating mobile users involved in the communications. We combine shared key generation based on received signal strength (RSS) between two involving entities and unlinkable but accountable pseudonymous-based anonymous authentication with efficient and effective pseudonym self-generation and revocation process. Our proposed shared key generation provides unique pseudonymous identities (PIDs). Based on PID at epoch time and updated revocation list obtained from GM, we achieve an efficient cost computation of revocation check. We show the measurement scenario of system performance by varying the traffic conditions either quiet or crowded to create communication impairment combined with mobile users’ speed varying on 20 km/h, 40 km/h, and 60 km/h respectively and ping time interval settings on 7 ms, 10 ms, and 20 ms, respectively. Here, the result of evaluation shows that PIDs generation works properly by the number of generated PIDs up to 11 with the highest correlation up to 0.99. Meanwhile, quantization algorithm works properly for 3000 or more ICMP packets and achieves zero key disagreement rate (KDR). Total signing and verification times are sufficient practical about 90 ms and 100 ms, respectively.