An Efficient Identity Authentication Scheme With Dynamic Anonymity for VANETs

Nowadays, as an essential technique for intelligent transportation, vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) has significantly improved people’s travel experience, providing richer, and smarter services for vehicles while ensuring driver safety. However, considering that VANETs are complex, some security challenges still remain, including but not restricted to privacy preserving of vehicles, authentication of messages, limited resources in computational power, and network bandwidth. To address these issues, many privacy-preserving identity authentication schemes for VANETs have been proposed recently. However, these schemes still suffer some limitations. First, their computational overheads are heavy due to the complex calculations. Second, some schemes are vulnerable to various security weaknesses, unable to resist normal attacks. Third, in some schemes, the same pseudonym keeps unchanged and it is linked to the corresponding private key of user. The consequence is that if the user wants to change its pseudonym, the corresponding private key must be changed. In order to further solve the above problems, we propose a novel privacy-preserving identity authentication protocol based on the certificateless aggregate signature scheme, allowing the user to generate a fuzzy identity to hide her real identity, and the private key can be kept unchanged even if the corresponding pseudonym is updated. Furthermore, to achieve efficiency in computation, bilinear mapping is avoided in our proposed scheme. We prove that our protocol satisfies unforgeability in the random oracle based on a classic complexity assumption. Finally, the security and efficiency analyses demonstrate that our construction enjoys more security features and better performance compared with the existing schemes.