EAIA: An Efficient and Anonymous Identity Authentication Protocol for V2V Communications in Internet of Vehicles

Vehicle ad hoc networks (VANETs) have been significantly developed in recent years and have played a key role in enhancing the driving experience by enabling safer and more efficient vehicle-to-vehicle interactions by information exchange. Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications are particularly important, not only helping to prevent collisions and improve traffic efficiency but also providing critical situational awareness for drivers or autonomous driving systems. The communication is typically supported by Roadside Units (RSU). However, in practice, vehicles may go beyond the communication coverage of an RSU and suffer various malicious attacks. At the same time, considering the limited computing resources of the onboard unit (OBU) of vehicles, the design of lightweight security protocols to support V2V communications is highly demanded. To address this issue, this paper proposes an efficient anonymous V2V identity authentication protocol that is designed for the scenarios of lacking RSUs. The proposed protocol has been formally evaluated by using the Scyther tool, showing its ability to withstand major typical malicious attacks. Performance evaluation demonstrates that the proposed protocol is efficient in terms of communication overhead and computational overhead (47.07 μs and 1.405 ms, respectively), showing it a viable solution for V2V vehicular communications.