A Secure and Efficient Certificateless Aggregate Signature Authentication Scheme With Pseudonyms for VANETs

Nowadays, many researchers design certificateless aggregate signature (CLAS) authentication schemes with pseudonyms for vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) to ensure data integrity, source authentication, and user privacy-preserving. Unfortunately, our analysis reveals that even the state-of-the-art schemes cannot be directly applied to VANETs as they are either not entirely secure or inefficient. Therefore, building on the insights of previous research, we propose a secure and efficient CLAS scheme with pseudonyms for VANETs, which is based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) construction and without bilinear pairing (pairing-free). Then, we specifically introduce the generalized forking lemma to enhance the transparency of the security proof process. Based on standard cryptographic assumptions, we prove that the proposed CLAS scheme can withstand attacks from Type-I, Type-II, and Type-III adversaries while satisfying various security and privacy requirements in VANETs. Finally, performance analysis shows that compared to the latest pairing-free CLAS schemes in VANETs, the proposed CLAS scheme not only offers more comprehensive security but also has lower computational and communication overhead. Additionally, we also utilized the MIRACL cryptography library for simulation experiments, and the results indicate that the proposed scheme still performs lower overhead in practical simulation environments, making it more suitable for resource-constrained VANET environments.