An efficient fuzzy certificateless signature-based authentication scheme using anonymous biometric identities for VANETs

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are essential technologies to ensure safe road traffic management and enhance driving convenience. Nowadays, diversified authentication schemes have been developed in VANETs for the purpose of safer communication between nodes. For instance, biometric technology which employs biometric information as users' authentic identity is widely adopted in message authentication due to its visible benefits. Nonetheless, there is a significant problem in current biometric identity-based authentication schemes that noise is inevitable in each collection of biometric information, making these schemes lack critical error tolerance. Additionally, anonymous biometric identity is difficult to be realized, which fails to meet the basic standard of VANETs. For solving the above key issues, we propose the first efficient fuzzy certificateless signature-based (FCLS) authentication scheme using anonymous biometric identities for VANETs. In virtue of its superior error tolerance, it enables authentication between two identities represented by two attribute sets within a certain Hamming distance. Besides, the newly developed authentication scheme realizes effective conditional privacy so that drivers' real biometric identities can be ensured. Through the formal security proof, this FCLS scheme is existentially unforgeable against adaptive chosen message attack (EU-CMA) in the random oracle model (ROM), which reaches the higher security. Compared with current advanced schemes, the new authentication scheme is more efficient in computation and communication according to performance analysis.