Broadcast Authentication: An Efficient Identity Authentication Protocol With Provable Security for VANETs

With the advancement of the Internet of Things (IOT), Vehicular Ad Hoc networks (VANETs) are integrated into intelligent transportation systems to facilitate vehicle communication. However, as the number of vehicles and application diversity increase, significant security concerns have emerged, including message authentication and vehicle privacy protection. Consequently, researchers have devised several identity authentication protocols to ensure legitimate communication between parties. Nevertheless, existing schemes fail to address real-time response identity authentication due to high-speed vehicle movement and the need for traversing multiple domains. This limitation poses challenges in traffic management and even threatens human life. To overcome these issues, we propose a novel identity authentication method called broadcast authentication and design a new protocol incorporating this approach. The confidentiality and unforgeability of our proposal are proven based on classic hardness assumptions. Our protocol enables vehicles to authenticate with multiple roadside units through a single request communication process, thereby avoiding delays in authentication while saving costs associated with communication and computation. Compared with existing schemes, our protocol demonstrates superior computing efficiency and performance.