HPBS: A Hybrid Proxy Based Authentication Scheme in VANETs

As a part of intelligent transportation, vehicle ad hoc networks (VANETs) have attracted the attention of industry and academia and have brought great convenience to drivers. As an open communication environment, any user can broadcast messages in the system. However, some of these users are malicious users and malicious users can broadcast false messages to interfere with the normal operation of the system. Therefore, we needed to authenticate the identity of the message sender. Currently, there are two main authentication methods in VANETs, one using public key infrastructure (PKI) to verify message integrity and sender identity, and the other using anonymous authentication schemes. Due to the high computational and transport overhead involved in validation, the certification efficiency of most existing schemes is not satisfactory. Therefore, these schemes are generally not applicable to real-world scenarios. In order to improve the efficiency of certification and satisfy the security requirements, in this paper, we proposed a hybrid proxy based authentication scheme (HPBS). In HPBS, by introducing the concept of agent vehicles and integrating identity-based and PKI-based hybrid authentication, we solved three problems in the VANETs environment: (1) improving the effectiveness of roadside units (RSUs) in terms of authenticating messages; (2) reducing the computational burden of RSUs; (3) protecting the privacy of users. The simulation results illustrate that the scheme not only ensures network security, but also greatly improves the efficiency of information verification.