An efficient identity-based signature scheme without bilinear pairing for vehicle-to-vehicle communication in VANETs

Vehicles exchange traffic-related messages with neighboring vehicles to aid passengers and provide efficient traffic management. This is done via wireless communication channels in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs). Security and privacy issues are a major concern in VANETs. A typical attack consists of a malicious third party modifying and retransmitting intercepted messages. Current state of the art solutions enable a verifier to authenticate the source of received messages as well as to check their integrity before accepting them. However, these solutions do not adequately address the efficiency with which multiple messages are verified in VANETs deployed in high traffic density areas. Due to this, the computational load on a verifier is increased. In this paper, an efficient Identity-Based Signature with Conditional Privacy-Preserving Authentication (IBS-CPPA) scheme based on the Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) and general one-way hash functions for V2V communication is proposed. This scheme supports the batch signature verification method, which enables each vehicle to authenticate a large number of messages at the same time. We provide a security proof of the proposed IBS-CPPA scheme in the random oracle model. The performance evaluation indicates that our scheme is more efficient in terms of computational cost with respect to similar schemes.