Provable Secure and Lightweight Vehicle Message Broadcasting Authentication Protocol with Privacy Protection for VANETs

With the emergence of intelligent transportation and the widespread use of vehicle network equipment, the vehicle ad hoc network (VANET) is widely used in the communication among participating entities to obtain traffic information, such as speed, traffic congestion, road conditions, and accident. In VANET, the secure and efficient message broadcasting protocol can effectively reduce the message transmission delay, to meet the requirements of openness, real-time, and high-speed mobility in the VANET environment. However, most related researches mainly rely on third parties, such as TA and RSU, to ensure the identity authentication of vehicles and the security of message transmission, which are not suitable for infrastructure-less scenario. Therefore, designing a protocol for decentralized message broadcasting, identity authentication without a third party, and the safe message transmission is meaningful. In this study, we propose a lightweight vehicle message broadcasting authentication protocol, which realizes the identity authentication of the message broadcasting vehicle and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) key agreement without the need of a trusted third party. In our protocol, the vehicle can verify the identity of the sending vehicle to identify the reliability of the message source and prevent malicious messages. Meanwhile, the vehicle can update its pseudonym identity to resist tracking attacks, but the trusted authority can always track the real identity of the malicious message sending vehicle according to the sent messages. The proposed protocol is proved secure by formal security proof. In addition, our scheme provides better security and computational efficiency over others by comparing with related schemes.

Automated summary

This study proposes a lightweight vehicle message broadcasting authentication protocol that achieves identity authentication without a third party, ensuring secure message transmission with reduced delay and improved security and computational efficiency compared to related schemes.