An Efficient Authentication and Key Agreement for Vehicular communications

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) are crucial in improving transportation infrastructure by supporting vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) communication. Nevertheless, maintaining secure and efficient interoperability in such environments has always been a big push because of high mobility, and the vulnerability to cyber threats. This paper puts forward a novel authentication and key agreement protocol to be used in V2I communication settings of VANETs taking into consideration security and efficiency factors. The work in the proposal uses a lightweight cryptographic solution to maintain authentication of vehicles and the infrastructure without incurring much computational and communication load. In general, it is possible to use elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), and hash functions to protect the exchange from basic threats like impersonation, replay and so on. In addition, the proposed protocol includes a session key agreement mechanism that builds the secure communication channels in a dynamic way and provides confidentiality and integrity for the data during the exchange of messages. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme has better performance and it has lower computational overhead and communication overhead than the other related protocols.