PEPA: Paillier cryptosystem-based efficient privacy-preserving authentication scheme for VANETs

The use of the Internet of Things is increasing dramatically, creating a network of objects from sensors to smart appliances, such as smart vehicles. Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs), as a special network, enables connected vehicles to communicate with other entities and provide a variety of stable communication services by infrastructures on both sides of the road for vehicles. However, the open-medium nature of communications and the high-speed mobility of vehicles may bring several potential security and privacy issues. To solve the issues, this paper proposes a Paillier cryptosystem-based efficient privacy-preserving authentication scheme (PEPA) for VANETs. The proposed PEPA supports batch verification of presentation tokens and allows users to interact with other entities without disclosing any sensitive information. In addition to this, multiple authorities are adopted to reveal the real identities of malicious users via cooperation. PEPA is more feasible than other schemes since it relies on a realistic tamper-proof device rather than an ideal one. System analysis demonstrates that the proposed PEPA achieves strong and verifiable privacy-preserving authentication and satisfies the common security and privacy requirements, such as unlinkability, accountability, and so on. Performance analysis and simulation demonstrate that the proposed PEPA offers better performance compared with traditional ones.

Automated summary

This paper proposes an efficient privacy-preserving authentication scheme (PEPA) based on the Paillier cryptosystem to address the security and privacy issues in VANETs. The proposed scheme supports batch verification and allows users to interact without revealing sensitive information. Multiple authorities are used to reveal the identities of malicious users. System analysis and simulation show that PEPA achieves strong privacy-preserving authentication.