Design and Performance Analysis of a Lightweight Authentication Protocol for Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks

In this paper, we propose an efficient and secure authentication protocol for Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs). Our proposed protocol utilizes irreversible secure hash operations and the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm ECDSA instead of computationally expensive encryption and decryption techniques. We conduct a security analysis of our proposed protocol and demonstrate that it meets various safety requirements, including conditional privacy of vehicles, preservation of vehicle identity, traceability, and un-linkability. We also perform a performance analysis of our protocol compared to existing protocols in terms of computational overhead and execution time at different components (Vehicle, Road Side Unit, and Trusted Authority). The results shows that our proposed protocol outperforms existing protocols in terms of less computational cost which makes it highly suitable for deployment in V ANETs.