An Efficient Conditional Privacy-Preserving Authentication Scheme for Vehicular Sensor Networks Without Pairings

Constructing intelligent and efficient transportation systems for modern metropolitan areas has become a very important quest for nations possessing metropolitan cities with ever-increasing populations. A new trend is the development of smart vehicles with multiple sensors able to dynamically form a temporary vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) or a vehicular sensor network (VSN). Along with a wireless-enabled roadside unit (RSU) network, drivers in a VSN can efficiently exchange important or urgent traffic information and make driving decisions accordingly. In order to support secure communication and driver privacy for vehicles in a VSN, we develop a new identity-based (ID-based) signature based on the elliptic curve cryptosystem (ECC) and then adopt it to propose a novel conditional privacy-preserving authentication scheme based on our invented ID-based signature. This scheme provides secure authentication process for messages transmitted between vehicles and RSUs. A batch message verification mechanism is also supported by the proposed scheme to increase the message processing throughput of RSUs. To further enhance scheme efficiency, both pairing operation and MapToPoint operation are not applied in the proposed authentication scheme. In comparison with existing pseudo-ID-based authentication solutions for VSN, this paper shows that the proposed scheme has better performance in terms of time consumption.