A Provably Secure Lightweight Authentication Based on Elliptic Curve Signcryption for Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communication in VANETs

In vehicular ad hoc networks, the exchange of safety messages plays a crucial role in transportation efficiency and safety. However, safety messages are generally only signed rather than encrypted when broadcast, which lures malicious attackers to collect sensitive and private data. Obviously, an efficient privacy-preserving signcryption mechanism is essential for the timely and correct acceptance of safety messages. Currently, most state-of-the-art mechanisms satisfy security requirements, but performance is inefficient. Therefore, in this article, we design a provably secure lightweight authentication based on elliptic curve signcryption (EPSLA) for vehicle-to-vehicle communication, which can fulfill batch unsigncryption and a feasible security communication scheme in practical scenarios. The EPSLA scheme ensures security in relation to existential unforgeability against adaptive chosen message attacks and indistinguishability against adaptive chosen ciphertext attacks under the hardness assumption of the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem in the random oracle model. Performance analysis shows that our scheme significantly performs better than the comparison schemes.