Abstract:
To enhance road safety, Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) facilitate the exchange of safety-critical messages between smart vehicles and road traffic authorities. However, VANET’s wireless channels are prone to several attacks, such as replay or modification. Therefore, to protect the links, robust authentication and message integrity mechanisms are required. Previously, several robust authentication schemes have been devised. However, those designs often struggle with complex certificate management, the key escrow problem, and the necessity for secure channels to establish user keys. Additionally, prior methods rely on pseudonyms to ensure user privacy. To implement it, several pseudonyms are stored in the vehicle’s device, which burdens the device. To overcome these limitations, this study introduces an efficient and escrow-free dynamic anonymous authentication scheme tailored for VANETs. By utilizing the paradigm of certificate-based cryptography and fuzzy identity generation, the proposed design eliminates the limitations. Through rigorous security analysis, the proposed design’s effectiveness against various threats is demonstrated. Furthermore, a detailed performance analysis, including computational and communication cost comparisons, showcases the scheme’s feasibility for VANET deployment. An NS-3 simulation further confirms the suitability of the proposed scheme for real-world VANET communication scenarios.