SAES: A self-checking authentication scheme with higher efficiency and security for VANET

Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET), a wireless network for V2X communication, provides a new opportunity to create a safer, comfortable and efficient traffic environment. However, the large scale and open environment of VANET brings many problems and challenges to information security, especially the vehicular authentication problem. Many existing authentication schemes always used complex cryptographic algorithms in the process of vehicular authentication to avoid the leak of users’ privacy information. Nevertheless, these schemes are unsuitable for VANET due to its higher computational overhead, because VANET’s environments are characterized by short communication time between the vehicles and the Road-Side Units (RSUs). Therefore, efficiency and security should be fully considered during the process of vehicular authentication. This paper proposed A Self-checking Authentication Scheme with Higher Efficiency and Security for VANET, named SAES. The proposed scheme adopts self-checking authentication based on pseudonym instead of traditional authentication with the Trusted Authority (TA) participating in the authentication process to minimize the authentication cost. Meanwhile, the group signature is used to reduce the frequency of authentication for legitimate vehicles. The security and performance results of the proposed scheme, analyzed by the provable security and simulation, indicate that this scheme not only meets the requirements of security for VANET but also has a better performance in comparison with existing schemes.