Lattice-Based Conditional Privacy-Preserving Batch Authentication Protocol for Fog-Assisted Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

The vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is a basic component of intelligent transportation systems. Due to the growing security and privacy-preserving requirements of the VANET, a lot of conditional privacy-preserving authentication (CPPA) protocols have been proposed in recent years. Unfortunately, the traditional CPPA protocols, which are based on a trusted authority (TA) and rely solely on classical mathematical problems, cannot resist quantum attacks. Moreover, these protocols do not take into account the increasingly complex traffic flow in the VANET and cannot utilize fog nodes (FNs) to assist in the TA’s authentication work. In this paper, we design a lattice-based and fog-assisted conditional privacy-preserving authentication (LFCPPA) protocol to solve the above challenges. Compared to existing solutions, we have made the following improvements. First, our protocol is resistant to quantum attacks. Second, the solution supports batch processing of signature verification and mutual authentication of identity between the TA / FNs and vehicles. Third, in our design, FNs reduce the computing pressure of the TA to improve the efficiency of the system. In addition, we demonstrate the security of the protocol under the random oracle model with provable security. Finally, the efficiency and security of this scheme are better than similar solutions. Specifically, compared with the latest scheme, in terms of computational cost, our scheme is reduced by 74.47%, 85.58%, 19.69%, and 85.90% in the four stages of the protocol. Meanwhile, in terms of communication cost, our protocol reduces it by 89.98%.