SMAKA: Secure Many-to-Many Authentication and Key Agreement Scheme for Vehicular Networks

With the rising popularity of the Internet and communication technology, vehicles can analyze and judge the real-time data collected by various cloud service providers (CSPs) in a vehicular network. However, in a vehicular network environment, real-time data are transmitted via wireless channels, which can lead to security and privacy issues. To avoid illegal access by adversaries, vehicle authentication and key agreement mechanism has been considered as one of the promising security measures in vehicular network environments. Besides, most of the solutions focus on authentication between one vehicle and one CSP. In such strategies, the implementation of efficient authentication for multiple vehicles and CSPs simultaneously is usually challenging. Further, they are also subjected to performance limitations due to the overhead incurred. To solve these issues, we propose a many-to-many authentication and key agreement scheme for secure authentication between multiple vehicles and CSPs. The proposed scheme can prevent unauthorized access and provide SK-security even if temporary information is leaked. To improve the service, the CSP only needs to broadcast an anonymous message periodically instead of having to generate a unique anonymous message for each of vehicles. Similarly, when a vehicle wants to request the services of m CSPs, it only needs to send one request message instead of m. Therefore, the proposed scheme not only implements many-to-many communication but also significantly reduces the computation and communication overhead. Moreover, a thorough security analysis shows that the proposed scheme provides better security compared to other related schemes.

Automated summary

The article introduces a many-to-many authentication and key agreement scheme that can achieve secure authentication between vehicles and cloud service providers in vehicular network environments. The proposed scheme prevents unauthorized access, improves service efficiency, and reduces computation and communication overhead.