An Efficient Authentication Scheme for Privacy-Preserving in Secure Vehicular Communications

VANETs can significantly improve traffic management and driving safety. It has attracted great attention of government departments, academia and industry circles. To perform cooperative operations, vehicles should broadcast traffic information to RSUs and other vehicles periodically. Unfortunately, the massive messages should be digitally signed and verified in a very short time to the real-time constraints. To deal with this issue, we propose an efficient anonymous authentication scheme, in which RSU becomes the message center that can establish the session relationship with the surrounding vehicles and assign temporary identities to vehicles. Using the temporary identity and session key, every vehicle is only responsible for transmitting messages to RSU, the latter for collecting and validating messages from vehicles and broadcasting the information verified. To obtain traffic information, any vehicle only need verify the broadcast messages from RSU. In addition, the proposed scheme can provide anonymity in the RSU's coverage. The security and performance analysis illustrates that the proposed scheme can effectively protect the user's security and can provide fast authentication.