eCLAS: An Efficient Pairing-Free Certificateless Aggregate Signature for Secure VANET Communication

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have become an important part of the intelligent transportation system that aims to promote communication among vehicles to ensure vehicular safety and improve the driving experience. In VANETs, signed messages need to be authenticated by roadside units in a very short time. Certificateless aggregate signature (CLAS) scheme has been considered as one of the promising solutions to solve the problem of limited network bandwidth and computing power in VANETs environment. In this article, we propose an efficient pairing-free CLAS, named eCLAS, which is suitable for communication between vehicle to infrastructure. The aggregated signature allows individual signature on different messages from different vehicles to be aggregated into one short signature. In the random oracle model, the security of the scheme is proved by the adaptive selection message attack and the difficulty of computation of discrete logarithm problem on the elliptic curve. Additionally, the security analysis shows that the proposed scheme can meet security requirements in VANETs. Compared with existing schemes, the result demonstrates that our scheme has obvious advantages in signature verification, thereby granting it better applicability.