A Cross-Domain Authentication Scheme for Vehicular Networks Based on Mobile Edge Computing

The development of vehicular networks has significantly improved driving safety and enabled a wide range of intelligent transportation applications. However, in cross-domain scenarios, vehicular networks still face challenges, such as security risks, privacy breaches, and heavy computing burden. In this article, we propose a novel cross-domain authentication scheme for vehicular networks based on Mobile Edge Computing (MEC), in which the computing tasks on the vehicle side are offloaded to the edge server, which effectively alleviates the computation overhead on the resource-constrained vehicle side. Unlike existing schemes, we adopt a server function division and a distributed registration center approach to alleviate the burden and risk associated with the trusted authority (TA) during the authentication process. In addition, we use anonymity mechanism and batch verification to achieve privacy protection and improve authentication efficiency, respectively. Through rigorous security proofs and detailed security analyses, it is demonstrated that the proposed scheme meets the security requirements of vehicular networks and can withstand a broader range of security attacks. Performance comparison results indicate that the proposed scheme outperforms existing related schemes in terms of both communication and computation overheads.