Provably Secure Conditional-Privacy Access Control Protocol for Intelligent Customers-Centric Communication in VANET

Globally, the development of Intelligent Cyber-Physical Transportation Systems (ICTS) aims to tackle several challenges, including reducing traffic accidents and fuel usage, alleviating congestion, shortening travel time, and enhancing overall transportation safety. These systems leverage advanced customer-centric communication and networked control methods, such as inter-vehicle, vehicle-to-roadside (V2R), and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication through the use of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) to cover all aspects of transportation-based information. In existing systems, once devices are registered with a Trusted Authority (TA), subsequent authentication still relies on the TA’s assistance. However, these devices typically remain stationary, and frequent interaction with the TA becomes impractical and costly in highly mobile VANET environments. To address this challenge, we propose a secure access control protocol with conditional privacy for VANETs. Unlike other protocols, our protocol does not require the TA’s involvement during authentication between vehicles and RSUs. Additionally, our protocol leverages pseudonym mechanisms to provide conditional privacy, enabling legitimate vehicles to remain anonymous while malicious ones can be tracked. Our proposed scheme is supported by both formal and informal security analyses and has been shown to be secure against several known attacks in VANETs. Furthermore, compared to relevant studies, our protocol achieves 30.2505% of efficiency in terms of computation cost and 11.09276% of efficiency in terms of communication cost, respectively.