An efficient anonymous authentication scheme with secure communication in intelligent vehicular ad-hoc networks

Abstract

Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) have become increasingly significant in intelligent transportation systems, they play a great role in improving traffic safety and efficiency. In the deployment of intelligent VANETs, intelligent vehicles can efficiently exchange important or urgent traffic information and make driving decisions. Meanwhile, secure data communication and vehicle’s identity privacy have been highlighted. To cope with these security issues, in this paper, we construct an efficient anonymous authentication scheme with secure communication in intelligent VANETs. Combing the ElGamal encryption technique with a modified Schnorr signature technique, the proposed scheme provides secure anonymous authentication process for encrypted message in the vehicle-to-infrastructure communication model, and achieves identity privacy, forward security, and reply attack resistance simultaneously. Moreover, except the trusted authority (TA), any outside entity cannot trace the real identity of an intelligent vehicle. The proposed scheme is designed on an identity-based system, which can remove the costs of establishing public key infrastructure (PKI) and certificates management. Compared with existing authentication schemes, the proposed scheme is much more practical in intelligent VANETs.