Abstract

By broadcasting messages about traffic status to vehicles wirelessly, a vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) can improve traffic safety and efficiency. To guarantee secure communication in VANETs, security and privacy issues must be addressed before their deployment. The conditional privacy-preserving authentication (CPPA) scheme is suitable for solving security and privacy-preserving problems in VANETs, because it supports both mutual authentication and privacy protection simultaneously. Many identity-based CPPA schemes for VANETs using bilinear pairings have been proposed over the last few years to enhance security or to improve performance. However, it is well known that the bilinear pairing operation is one of the most complex operations in modern cryptography. To achieve better performance and reduce computational complexity of information processing in VANET, the design of a CPPA scheme for the VANET environment that does not use bilinear paring becomes a challenge. To address this challenge, we propose a CPPA scheme for VANETs that does not use bilinear paring and we demonstrate that it could supports both the mutual authentication and the privacy protection simultaneously. Our proposed CPPA scheme retains most of the benefits obtained with the previously proposed CPPA schemes. Moreover, the proposed CPPA scheme yields a better performance in terms of computation cost and communication cost making it be suitable for use by the VANET safety-related applications.