Efficient authentication scheme for vehicular ad-hoc networks with batch verification using bilinear pairings

The potential for vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) in improving traffic, enhancing road safety and reducing traffic accidents has attracted attention from academia, industry, and governments. To ensure secure communication in VANETs, a number of authentication schemes, including those with batch verification, were proposed in recent years. However, studies have demonstrated that most of the existing schemes suffer from bad performance or weak security. To address those problems, we construct a new identity-based digital signature (IBDS) scheme using bilinear pairings. The IBDS scheme is then used to construct a new identity-based conditional privacy-preserving authentication (IBCPPA) scheme for VANETs without the need for a map-to-point hash function or double secret keys. Using simulations, we demonstrate that our provably-secure IBCPPA scheme not only achieves better performance than related schemes, but also overcomes the inefficiency problem of the double secret keys in related schemes (i.e., the system does have to manage two secret keys to provide security).