A Secure and Efficient Communication Scheme with Authenticated Key Establishment Protocol for Road Networks

The authentication protocols are trusted components in a communication system in order to protect sensitive information against a malicious adversary in the road network environment by means of providing a variety of services including users’ privacy and authentication. Authenticated key agreement protocol is a useful cryptographic primitive, which can be used to protect the confidentiality, integrity and authenticity for transmitted data over insecure networks. From the point of view of the management of pre-shared secrets, one of the advantages of three-party authenticated key agreement protocols is that they are more suitable for use in a network with large numbers of users compared with two-party authenticated key agreement protocols. Using smart cards is a practical, secure measure to protect the secret private keys of a user. In this paper, we introduce an Authentication key establishment protocol for IPv6-based Road networks. In this architecture, a mobile vehicle obtains a unique address from a neighbor mobile vehicle or a road side unit without duplicate address detection, and the leaving mobile vehicle’s address space can be automatically reclaimed for reassignment. If the next mobile vehicle located is in transmission range, then the mobile vehicle forwards the packets; if not, then it carries the packets until meeting. The carry mostly occurs on sparsely populated road segments; with long carry distances having long end-to-end packet delays. On the other hand, we also describe a new authentication method based on a cryptographic protocol including a zero-knowledge proof that each node must use to convince another node on the possession of certain secret without revealing anything about it, which allows encrypted communication during authentication. The proposed protocol featured with the following characteristics: Firstly, it offers anonymous authentication: a message issuer can authenticate itself. Secondly, it provides confidential: the secrecy of the communication content can be protected. The address configuration scheme must lower the cost in order to enhance the scalability. Thirdly, it is efficient: it achieves low storage requirements, fast message verification and cost-effective identity tracking in case of a dispute. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of this protocol. The data results show that protocol effectively improves the address configuration performance and our scheme is secure against passive and active attacks. Our scheme provides high security along with low computational and communication costs. As a result, our scheme is practically suitable for mobile devices in the road network environment as compared to other related schemes in the literature.