A Certificateless and Privacy-Preserving Authentication with Fault-Tolerance for Vehicular Sensor Networks

The vehicular sensor network has been developed to improve traffic, enhance the driving experience and so on, and is an inevitable technology trend. In vehicular sensor network, large amounts of data generated by vehicles need to be transmitted in the open channel, so it is important to ensure the integrity of information and vehicular privacy. For such a harsh condition, the aggregate signature technology is a very suitable solution, because it not only provides message integrity and authentication, but is also well suited to resource-constrained environments. Thus, in this paper, for vehicular sensor networks, we construct a certificateless and fault-tolerant aggregate signature (CLFTAS) scheme based on the elliptic curve cryptosystem. The certificateless nature makes our scheme free from the certificate management issue in traditional public key cryptography and the key escrow issue in identity-based cryptography. Fault tolerance greatly makes up for the aggregate signature's defect that adding an invalid individual signature to a valid aggregate invalidates the entire aggregation. Moreover, our scheme can protect the privacy of the vehicle’ identity. In the end, we give the security proof and performance evaluation. In the random oracle model, our scheme is secure under the assumption that solving the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem is hard, and has great performance optimization and functionality compared with the state-of-the-art.