CPAV: Computationally Efficient Privacy Preserving Anonymous Authentication Scheme for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

In this paper, we propose a computationally efficient privacy preserving anonymous authentication scheme based on the use of anonymous certificates and signatures for vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). Even though there were many existing schemes to provide anonymous authentication based on anonymous certificates and signatures in VANETs, the existing schemes suffer from high computation cost in the certificate revocation list (CRL) checking process and in the certificate and the signature verification process. Therefore, it is not possible to verify a large number of messages per second in VANETs which would lead to high message loss. Hence, we use a computationally efficient anonymous mutual authentication mechanism to validate the message source and anonymous signatures in order to guarantee the integrity of messages. Moreover, a conditional tracking mechanism is introduced to trace the real identity of vehicles and revoke them from VANET in the case of dispute. This proposed scheme is implemented and performance analysis shows that our scheme is more efficient in terms of certificate and signature verification delay, while keeping conditional privacy in VANETs.