The rapid expansion in research has led to vast interest in intelligent transport systems (ITSs), especially vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), which include communication among smart vehicles by using built-in sensors. Authorizing these vehicles and preserving their privacy while sharing messages play an important role in secured data transmission. Messages should be signed by vehicles and verified between legitimate entities to establish trust and decrease security risks. Traditional protocols operate in a centralized mode, where a trusted authority (TA) is tasked with authorizing secure communication between vehicles and bears the computational costs for the security operations for every entity in a VANET. Lightweight and secure solutions are important to ensure the advancement of wireless communication by preventing malicious users. This article presents a lightweight privacy-preserving signature-based authentication (LPPSA) protocol that solves the limitations of state-of-the-art protocols while reducing the computational burden on a TA. The proposed LPPSA protocol takes advantage of the short elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) parameters and leverages the Diffie-Hellman key exchange algorithm to generate shared secret keys. The roadside unit (RSU) plays a major role in assisting this authentication process and helps in reducing the overall computational complexity of a TA. The RSU provides lightweight secure authentication along with malicious vehicle revocation. The performance analysis and comparison with similar protocols show that the proposed LPPSA is more efficient, as it reduces the security risks and lowers the computational complexity of the overall system.
Intelligent vehicles and their infrastructure have been a booming topic that requires attention towards grooming security services and providing a safe-secure drive experience to users worldwide. Authentication of these vehicles within and away from the home network plays an essential role in maintaining seamless service access, especially for users moving away from the home network. Traditional schemes are centralized and primarily focus on vehicle authentication within a home network. Very few studies have been conducted on vehicle authentication during roaming. The trusted authority (TA) must authenticate its vehicle along with the one in roaming, which increases the communication and computational load on the TA as scalability increases. This article presents a lightweight authentication scheme, especially for roaming vehicles, and focuses on sharing the authentication load. A vehicle, along with its home TA (HTA) identity, sends an authentication request to a nearby roadside unit (RSU) during roaming. After receiving an authentication request from the RSU, the foreign TA (FTA) connects to the HTA. Vehicle authenticity was confirmed as a session key generated for communication with a roaming vehicle, ensuring seamless service access. The proposed scheme was tested against standard BAN logic to prove that it meets the required security standards and authentication requirements. Furthermore, the communication and computation cost analysis proves that this scheme is lightweight compared with other traditional schemes. Security analysis proves that the proposed scheme can successfully prevent major attacks, such as anonymity, unlinkability, replay attack, message tampering, and malicious vehicle tracking.
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