An efficient authentication scheme for vehicular networks based on Merkle tree

Abstract

The rapid development of vehicular networks has significantly enhanced driving safety and promoted the widespread application of intelligent transportation systems. However, in scenarios involving authentication between vehicles and servers, vehicular networks still face challenges such as privacy protection, low authentication efficiency, and heavy computational burdens. We propose an efficient and fast authentication scheme that allows vehicles to access the server multiple times quickly with a single authentication. The scheme combines elliptic curve groups, bilinear mappings, and Merkle Hash Trees to provide a more secure, scalable, and efficient access control mechanism. After the initial authentication, vehicles can perform subsequent access requests without repeated authentication, significantly reducing the authentication overhead and improving system performance. By using non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs and Merkle Hash Tree-based log structures, the scheme effectively ensures the integrity of access records and prevents replay attacks and unauthorized access. Through rigorous security proofs and detailed security analysis, we demonstrate that the proposed scheme meets the security requirements of vehicular networks and is capable of resisting a wide range of security attacks. Performance evaluation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms existing related schemes in terms of both communication and computational overhead.