A Novel Identity-Based Mutual Authentication Scheme for Vehicle Ad Hoc Networks

The vehicle ad hoc network (VANET) is an emerging industry that deeply integrates a new generation of network communication technology with automotive and road transportation. As the basic nodes of VANETs, vehicles can communicate and share information with other peer vehicles. However, with the rapid development of the industry, the security risks of VANETs, especially the problem of privacy leakage, have become increasingly prominent. To solve this problem, we propose a novel identity-based mutual authentication scheme (IBMA) for vehicle ad hoc networks. In this scheme, we adopt identity-based cryptography (IBC) to generate keys, which reduces the storage burden of the central authority and eliminates the need to rely on the certificate to distribute the public key. Meanwhile, the key escrow issue can be solved, which is a common problem in IBC. Then, the scheme adjusts central authority to semihonest and realizes unconditional privacy protection. In addition, our scheme achieves complete anonymity, which can prevent any other entities such as peer vehicles and central authorities from tracking vehicles. Finally, our scheme provides efficient traceability while protecting vehicle privacy. Security analysis shows that the proposed scheme satisfies a variety of security requirements such as anonymity, reliability, and nonrepudiation. Performance analysis demonstrates that our proposed scheme is efficient and requires less communication and storage cost compared with related schemes.