Design and Formal Verification of a VANET Lightweight Authentication Protocol

A lightweight authentication and key distribution protocol for VANET (Vehicle ad-hoc Network) was proposed by reducing the overload of network communication and vehicle gateway calculation. Both parties of communication could accomplish authentication without trusted third party by presetting each other's certificates. Session key was generated and distributed by cloud server to reduce times of data switch and calculation complexity of vehicle gateway. Lastly, BAN logic was used to decrease redundancy and to assure validity of the protocol. Applicability analysis and simulation show that proposed protocol has the advantage in the aspect of calculation and access time, and it fits VANET well.