MFSPV: A Multi-Factor Secured and Lightweight Privacy-Preserving Authentication Scheme for VANETs

Vehicles authentication, the integrity of messages exchanged, and privacy-preserving are essential features in vehicular ad hoc network (VANETs) security. Most of the previously proposed VANETs security solutions do not sufficiently satisfy the security and efficiency requirements. Besides, most of those solutions are heavily dependent on the system key and long-term sensitive data stored in an ideal tamper-proof device, which may not be practical or ideal for resource-constrained onboard units (OBUs), especially in the case of an unexpected cloning or physical attack. Therefore, a robust authentication solution should consider those security issues and the nature of resource-constrained nodes. To satisfy all these requirements, we propose a lightweight multi-factor authentication and privacy-preserving security solution for VANETs. It employs a combination of physically unclonable functions (PUF) and one-time dynamic pseudo-identities as authentication factors. Furthermore, it eliminates the heavy dependency on the system key by decentralising the wide precinct of the certificate authority (CA) into regional domains and achieves robust control of domains keys. A detailed analysis demonstrates that our scheme efficiently meets the VANETs security requirements, and offers more suitable communication and computation costs and features than existing schemes.