Computationally efficient privacy preserving authentication and key distribution techniques for vehicular ad hoc networks

The incorporation of electronics by embedding the relevant sensors in the physical devices in home and office, vehicles of all types, buildings in the smart cities and in all possible spheres of life form a network of devices termed as internet of things (IoT). It is being realized that vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) which are responsible for the reliable and secure communication among vehicles is a primary area of research in IoT and hence ensuring security in this area is essential. Thus, this work introduces a novel approach to improve the existing authentication support to VANETs. In this proposed framework, first an anonymous authentication approach for preserving the privacy is proposed which not only performs the vehicle user’s anonymous authentication but preserves the message integrity of the transmitting messages as well. Although many anonymous authentication schemes have been proposed in VANETs until now, the existing schemes suffer from a high computation cost during the signature and certificate verification process which leads to delayed authentication. Consequently, the vehicles and roadside units (RSUs) cannot authenticate more number of vehicles per second in VANETs. Second, an efficient anonymous group key distribution protocol is proposed in this paper for securely distributing the group key to the group of vehicles in the communication range of an RSU. The RSUs can send location based information to the group of vehicles in a secure manner using this group key. Experimental analysis portrays that the results of this new privacy preserving anonymous authentication and key management schemes are promising and efficient with regard to signature verification cost and computational cost in comparison with the existing schemes.