Secure Reputation-Based Authentication With Malicious Detection in VANETs

Reputation-based authentication is a mechanism used to establish trust and ensure the reliability of vehicle communication in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). However, existing schemes ignore the importance of privacy protection and face issues such as malicious vehicles spreading false or duplicate messages. To address these issues, this paper proposes a secure and anonymous reputation-based authentication scheme based on the ElGamal cryptosystem for the vehicular communication system, which promotes cooperative behavior and encourages vehicles' positive contribution to the network. In particular, we design an efficient duplicate detection mechanism based on the technique of Bloom filter to aid in identifying and isolating malicious vehicles. Security analysis is conducted to demonstrate the robust security of the proposed scheme. The results of performance evaluation highlight the superiority of the proposed scheme in addressing the identified shortcomings while maintaining reasonable computation and communication costs.