CVAR: Distributed and Extensible Cross-Region Vehicle Authentication With Reputation for VANETs

This study proposes a distributed and extensible cross-region vehicle authentication scheme with the reputation for improving the security and efficiency of cross-region vehicle authentication. The existing authentication schemes demonstrate the following drawbacks: 1) Each vehicle is preloaded with the same system private key, which may be leaked so that the entire system would be destroyed; 2) Other schemes rely on trusted authority to aid in selecting some cluster head nodes; 3) The existing cross-region authentication schemes are not flexible and scalable since they depend on the infrastructure fixed on the roadside. With the proposed scheme, each vehicle stores a long-term private key that is different from those of other vehicles, thereby avoiding a system crash when destroying a vehicle. When the cross-region vehicle enters a new region, it can verify the reputation value of the surrounding vehicles to select the edge computing vehicle. The formal security proof shows that the proposed scheme has adequate security under the real-or-random model. The performance evaluation of our scheme with several related schemes reveals that it generates relatively low computation and communication overhead, is more robust, and achieves minimum packet loss ratio and delay.