Efficient and multi-level privacy-preserving communication protocol for VANET

In this paper, we introduce an efficient and multi-level conditional privacy preservation authentication protocol in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) based on ring signature. The proposed protocol has three appealing characteristics: First, it offers conditional privacy preservation authentication: while every receiver can verify that a message issuer is an authorized participant in the system only a trusted authority can reveal the true identity of a message sender. Second, it is equipped with multi-level countermeasure: each vehicle can select the degree of privacy according to its own requirements. Third, it is efficient: our system outperforms previous proposals in message authentication and verification, cost-effective identity tracking in case of a dispute, and low storage requirements. We demonstrate the merits gained by the proposed protocol through extensive analysis.

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► An efficient privacy-preserving authentication protocol has been proposed for VANET.
► This protocol offers conditional and multi-level privacy preservation authentication.
► This protocol is efficient in terms of computation, communication and storage.
► The merits of the proposed protocol have been shown through extensive analysis.